The Saudi authorities have just revised upwards the number of deaths attributable to the MERS coronavirus. The balance sheet now shows 282 dead.
The Saudi Ministry of Health has just announced the death toll of the MERS coronavirus (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome) now reports 282 deaths. An upward revision after a “global assessment” of data on the disease in the kingdom. While the country is the first outbreak in the world, in a statement published on Tuesday on its website, the authorities also specify that they have recorded a total of 688 cases of infection since the onset of the disease in the kingdom in 2012. The latest assessment provided by these same authorities Monday evening reported 190 deaths and 575 cases of infection only. The Saudi ministry has put in place guidelines for the application of strict measures for data collection and for the sake of transparency.
Researchers on the road to treatment
In this increasingly worrying context, research to find a treatment is accelerating. Even if to date there is no drug, at the end of May Swiss and Swedish scientists announced that they had identified a substance capable of acting against coronaviruses. These results published in the specialized journal Plos Pathogens reported for the moment a preclinical success obtained only in the laboratory.
This team looked at substance K22, which works against fairly harmless coronaviruses that cause cold symptoms in humans. Their experiments showed that K22 was equally effective against all coronaviruses, even against the dangerous pathogens of SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) and MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome). K22 actually has the effect of inhibiting the replication of the coronavirus in cells that line the human respiratory system.
“For their reproduction, viruses must monopolize the membranes separating human cells, to build a kind of framework and install their own machinery for virus production,” explained the authors of this publication last May. Substance K22 makes this process impossible. The results confirm that the use of the host cell membrane is a crucial step in the virus life cycle ”. Even if these still preliminary results deserve to be confirmed, according to the authors this discovery constitutes for the moment the proof of concept that the coronaviruses can be influenced by antiviral drugs.
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