Liu Minxia

    mllmx@msn.com

    THE 38 people who had close contact with a South Korean man with the deadly Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) involved only one Shenzhen resident who was not infected with the disease, the city’s health authorities said late Saturday.

    The 31-year-old Shenzhen man, identified by only his surname, Li, worked as the translator of the MERS victim, Kim Myoung-Sik, and lives with his wife in Xin’an Subdistrict of Bao’an District, the health commission said.

    Li drove to Huizhou City by himself on the evening of May 26 to meet with the 44-year-old Kim, whose father was infected by the potentially deadly virus.

    Kim was among 64 people placed under isolation by South Korean health authorities, but Kim violated the quarantine order and disembarked in Hong Kong on May 26 before heading to Huizhou via Shenzhen’s Shatoujiao Checkpoint on a business trip.

    Li had dinner with Kim on the evening that day and spent the next day on a meeting with him before driving back to Shenzhen late May 27. Li arrived at his home in Nanshan District and spent the night there. He moved to his other home in Bao’an District on Thursday morning.

    Kim developed a fever and was sent to a Huizhou hospital early Thursday morning.

    Li was sent to a Shenzhen hospital and was placed under isolation Thursday night. Test results showed he was negative for the MERS virus Friday. His wife is also under isolation and Li’s two homes have been sterilized.

    None of the 38 people who had close contact with Kim showed symptoms, Huizhou’s health authorities said.

    South Korea has seven confirmed MERS patients. Kim is the son of the third confirmed patient and the younger brother of the fourth confirmed patient, according to the Korean Center for Disease Control and Prevention under the Ministry of Health and Welfare.

    First identified in humans in 2012, MERS is caused by a coronavirus, from the same family as the one that caused a deadly outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). There is no cure or vaccine.

    MERS’ fatality rate is 30 to 40 percent — much higher than the 10-percent rate for SARS, and the incubation period for MERS is two to 14 days, according to Professor David Hui Shu-cheong, head of respiratory medicine at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. But Hui said the virus does not show a high human-to-human transmission rate.

    He cited an overseas study that traced some 280 people who had been in contact with MERS patients that found only 4 percent of them became infected by the virus. According to the WHO, there were 1,139 confirmed cases of MERS, including at least 431 deaths as of May 25.

    (Related story on P4)