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. . COUNTRIES: UNITED STATES : MEDICAL: DISEASES: MERS CoV: Wendy Orent: Worried About MERS? Worry About Polio Instead . . Wendy Orent: Worried About MERS? Worry About Polio Instead By Wendy Orent Posted: 06/02/2014 12:01:00 AM CDT Twin Cities.com http://www.twincities.com/columnists/ci_25883565/ wendy-orent-worried-about-mers-worry-about-polio . A shorter URL for the above link: . http://tinyurl.com/pr32yyn . . On May 9, the World Health Organization stopped short of calling Middle East respiratory syndrome, or MERS, a global health emergency. That's a good thing. . In the 2-1/2 years since it was first identified, MERS has had a case fatality rate of about 30 percent, which sounds alarming. But during that period, there have been only 594 confirmed cases. Moreover, extensive surveillance in Saudi Arabia has shown that many people infected with the virus never showed symptoms, which means the fatality rate is actually far lower. . Still, case numbers have shot up in recent weeks. And the first two infections in the United States were recently reported, both of them in health-care workers who flew in from Saudi Arabia. (A third man reportedly contracted MERS from one of these patients but did not become sick.) . This has brought on the usual spate of pandemic alarm on the part of the news media, along with the repeated insistence that all viruses, everywhere, are only a plane ride away. . That is true, of course. Infected people can always get on a plane and end up in your neighborhood hospital: people with Ebola, SARS or now MERS. But that doesn't mean you're in danger or that pandemics of these or other diseases are likely. . One frequent assertion of the alarmists is that dangerous viruses will "mutate to transmissibility," meaning that organisms will acquire the ability to be transmitted easily from human to human. That actually happens very rarely. . As virologist Vincent Racaniello of Columbia University notes: "MERS has been in the Middle East for some time, at least since the '90s, and hasn't spread significantly. In my view, once you find a new virus and determine that it hasn't spread for a few years, that's the end; it's not going anywhere. ... I don't think this virus has even the potential that SARS did." . And the 2003 outbreak of SARS, he points out, infected only about 8,000 people worldwide, killing 800. That's a long way short of a true pandemic. As for MERS, "Efficient human transmission isn't in the cards," Racaniello says. . . The complete article may be read at the URL above. . . Sources found searching for Wendy Orent in Google Books https://www.google.com/webhp?hl= en&gws_rd=ssl#hl=en&q=%22Wendy+Orent%22&tbm=bks OR http://tinyurl.com/ku97opv . . Sources found searching for Wendy Orent in Google Scholar http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q= %22Wendy+Orent%22&btnG=&as_sdt=1%2C39 OR http://tinyurl.com/pwd2gyp . . Sources found searching for Wendy Orent in Temple Summon Search http://temple.summon.serialssolutions.com/search?s.cmd= removeFacetValueFilter%28ContentType,Newspaper+Article%29&s.fvf= ContentType,Newspaper+Article,t&s.ho=f&s.light=t&s.q=%22Wendy+Orent%22 OR http://tinyurl.com/pjz3z7o . . WEBBIB1314 . . 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