The ECDC communicable disease threats report is a weekly bulletin intended for epidemiologists and health professionals in the area of communicable disease prevention and control.

Following the identification of a novel coronavirus in two patients, both having been in Saudi Arabia albeit three months apart, ECDC has prepared a rapid risk assessment to consider the risk to the public in the EU. A version of this risk assessment was shared with EU and EEA national public health competent bodies and WHO on 24 September.

New and noteworthy in this update: the retrospective identification of novel coronavirus in biological samples from two fatal cases in Jordan (April 2012) and the results of a joint ECDC/WHO survey which confirms that EU/EEA Member States have an adequate capacity to detect novel coronavirus through their network of national reference laboratories: 18 of 30 in EU/EEA countries are capable of confirming positive screened samples by either ORF1b RT-PCR or other target RT-PCR assays with sequence analysis or whole-genome sequence analysis.

This fourth update of the rapid risk assessment of severe respiratory disease associated with a novel coronavirus (MERS-CoV) was produced in relation to 22 additional cases of laboratory-confirmed infections reported in the last two months.

This is an update of the rapid risk assessment of severe respiratory disease associated with a novel coronavirus, in relation to three more laboratory confirmed infections reported from the UK in the past 10 days.

For week 6, twenty countries reported concomitantly high/medium-intensity influenza transmission and wide geographic spread. In addition, thirteen countries reported increasing trends while six reported decreasing trends, compared to 22 reporting increasing trends and only one decreasing in week 5/2013.

​The ECDC communicable disease threats report is a weekly bulletin intended for epidemiologists and health professionals in the area of communicable disease prevention and control.

​The ECDC communicable disease threats report is a weekly bulletin intended for epidemiologists and health professionals in the area of communicable disease prevention and control.

As of 17 June 2013, 64 cases of MERS-CoV had been reported worldwide, including 38 deaths. All cases remain associated (including indirect association following secondary person-to-person transmission in the UK, Italy, Tunisia and France) with transmission in the Middle East. The age of cases ranges from two years to 94 years (N=60 cases, information on age not available for four cases), with a median of 56 years. Overall 70% (43/61) of cases are males.
The reports of new infections in Saudi Arabia over the past few weeks indicate that there is an ongoing source of infection and low risk of transmission to humans in the Middle East.

​The ECDC communicable disease threats report is a weekly bulletin intended for epidemiologists and health professionals in the area of communicable disease prevention and control.