05 July 2013 (14:00 UTC-07 Tango)/26 Sha’ban 1434/14 Tir 1391/28 Ji-Wie (5th month) 4711

“I do want to stress that there are a lot of things that we do not know. For example, one of the key pieces of missing information is that are there many people who have mild infections or asymptomatic infections that we are missing.”–Keiji Fukuda, UNWHO

Despite reports that the MERS virus is not at pandemic levels, the UN World Health Organization is calling an emergency International Health Regulations meeting, to be held next week.

This would be the second time the UNWHO called such a meeting.  The first was during the 2009 H1N1 pandemic.

“If in the future we do see some kind of explosion or if there is some big outbreak or we think the situation has really changed, we will already have a group of emergency committee experts who are already up to speed….”–Keiji Fukuda, UNWHO

On 03 July 2013, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia reported the deaths of one man and one woman.   Also, a man from Qatar died in London. He got infected back in September 2012, and died on 28 June 2013, yet it wasn’t reported until a few days ago.

Unofficially there have been 45 deaths out of 77 cases.  The New England Journal of Medicine confirms MERS has a 65% kill rate.