Newsletter
ANNAPOLIS, Md., USA/GENEVA, Switzerland: The Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), a recently discovered highly transmissible disease, has caused uncertainty among health care professionals worldwide. Despite the World Health Organization rating the situation as nonepidemic, the Organization for Safety, Asepsis and Prevention (OSAP) in the U.S. has launched a toolkit intended to bring oral health professionals up to date with the new threat.
The material, which is available for download on the organization's website, is intended as a quick reference for information on the disease. It also gives recommendations on how to identify early symptoms, which are similar to those of the common flu, and how prevent it from spreading to other patients or health care personnel.
"The MERS situation in the U.S. represents a very low risk to the general public at this time. However, dental clinicians are an important part of the health care system and should be knowledgeable of MERS and other transmissible disease," Executive Director Therese Long commented. "OSAP will keep its online MERS toolkit updated and continue to offer it as a free downloadable tool for dental health care workers."
She added that the disease and its impact on dentistry will be the focus of the organization's upcoming annual symposium, which will be held next week in Minneapolis in the U.S.
To date, more than 600 cases of infection with the MERS coronavirus have been confirmed by the WHO, of which the overall majority was reported to have occurred in the Middle East, particularly in Saudi Arabia. It also announced that it has tested an individual from the U.S. as positive, which still needs to be confirmed by laboratory tests.
Owing to the sharp increase in infections during the last two months, the organization has advised health care professionals worldwide to heighten infection control measures. A strain of the coronavirus related to the bird flu bug that wreaked havoc in Asia a couple of years ago, the new disease was first identified in 2012. Similar to severe acute respiratory syndrome, it is thought to have been transmitted from animals to humans, with the main source of infection suspected to be camels.
