BACKGROUND The Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) coronavirus has caused recurrent outbreaks in the Arabian Peninsula since 2012. Although MERS has low overall human-to-human transmission potential, there is occasional amplification in the healthcare setting, a pattern reminiscent of the dynamics of the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreaks in 2003. Here we provide a head-to-h...

Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) is a recently identified virus causing severe viral respiratory illness in people. Little is known about the reservoir in the Horn of Africa. In Kenya, where no human MERS cases have been reported, our survey of 335 dromedary camels, representing nine herds in Laikipia County, showed a high seroprevalence (46.9%) to MERS-CoV antibodies. Be...

Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) causes a zoonotic respiratory disease of global public health concern, and dromedary camels are the only proven source of zoonotic infection. Although MERS-CoV infection is ubiquitous in dromedaries across Africa as well as in the Arabian Peninsula, zoonotic disease appears confined to the Arabian Peninsula. MERS-CoVs from Africa have hith...

The use of k-mers has been a successful strategy for improving metagenomics studies, including taxonomic classifications, or de novo assemblies, and can be used to obtain sequences of interest from the available databases. The aim of this manuscript was to propose a simple but efficient strategy to generate k-mers and to use them to obtain and analyse in silico 16S rRNA sequence fragments. A to...

human coronaviruses–229E and -OC43 and severe acute respiratory syndrome–CoV were able to survive in suspension at room temperature for several days (8,9). Moreover, severe acute respiratory syndrome–CoV was completely inactivated after heat treatment at 60°C for 30 min (9). Human-to-human transmission of MERS-CoV is inefficient, and the transmission route has not yet been revealed. The predomi...

Risk factors for primary Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) illness in humans are incompletely understood. We identified all primary MERS-CoV cases reported in Saudi Arabia during March-November 2014 by excluding those with history of exposure to other cases of MERS-CoV or acute respiratory illness of unknown cause or exposure to healthcare settings within 14 days before il...

Counting the occurrence frequency of each k-mer in a biological sequence is an important step in many bioinformatics applications. However, most k-mer counting algorithms rely on a given k to produce single-length k-mers, which is inefficient for sequence analysis for different k. Moreover, existing k-mer counters focus more on DNA sequences and less on protein ones. In practice, the analysis o...

In January 2013, several months after Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) was first identified in Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, began surveillance for MERS-CoV. We analyzed medical chart and laboratory data collected by the Health Authority-Abu Dhabi during January 2013-May 2014. Using real-time reverse transcription PCR, we tested respiratory tract samples ...

Since the first imported case of Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) infection was reported on May 20, 2015 in Korea, there have been 186 laboratory-confirmed cases of MERS-CoV infection with 36 fatalities. Ninety-seven percent (181/186) of the cases had exposure to the health care facilities. We are reporting a superspreading event that transmitted MERS-CoV to 81 persons at...

Outbreaks of Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) raise questions about the prevalence and evolution of the MERS coronavirus (CoV) in its animal reservoir. Our surveillance in Saudi Arabia in 2014 and 2015 showed that viruses of the MERS-CoV species and a human CoV 229E-related lineage co-circulated at high prevalence, with frequent co-infections in the upper respiratory tract of dromedary c...