MOS: MERS

A year ago, my twitter trends included #Elonjet, #GOPtaxscam, #puppethistory, and MERS. Which almost makes me feel like not much has changed. Though I’d love to get into all of these, and I sincerely hope a profound discussion of puppet history will run the comments section, we gotta talk about COVID’s asshole cousin.

Today’s Moment of Science… MERS.

The coronavirus that causes Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) is creatively called… Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome-related coronavirus (MERS-CoV). First identified in 2012 in Saudi Arabia, most outbreaks have taken place in the Arabian peninsula. Anywhere from two days to two weeks after exposure, this speck of fuck starts coming for your life.

Symptoms sound a lot like COVID at first: cough, fever, diarrhea, vomiting, and shortness of breath. But in terms of severity for a typical case, that’s where a lot of similarities come to screeching halt. Pneumonia that progresses to acute respiratory distress syndrome isn’t a worse case scenario, it’s a normal case of bastard coronavirus. Over 70% of MERS patients have needed to be put on a ventilator. For perspective, about 3% of COVID patients require that degree of respiratory assistance. Of the 2600 confirmed cases to date, there has been a 35% fatality rate.

It’s as deadly as goddamn smallpox.

Suspected to have been gifted to us from bats originally, it’s now typically spread to humans from camels. Transmission can continue between humans via close contact, generally in hospitals or at home. Though asymptomatic cases occur, nobody should fuck around with masking orders if there’s an outbreak of this one. About two thirds of cases are in men, and fatality rates are also significantly higher in men.

“But Mrs. Auntie SciBabe,” I hear an astute observer ask with trepidation, “isn’t this sometimes referred to as the camel flu because it’s a zoonotic virus that’s transmitted from those spitting humpbacks, and men are perhaps more likely to work with the camels?”

Good observation, but note I said most- not all- outbreaks have taken place in the Arabian peninsula. An outbreak occurred in 2015 in South Korea when a traveler returned home from the Middle East with the virus, only being diagnosed nine days after seeking medical attention. With no additional camel involvement, 186 people fell ill, split between 111 males and 75 females, resulting in 38 deaths. A study in the Western Pac Surveillance and Response Journal suggested that in this outbreak, significantly more women were exposed at the hospital, but there were more infections and a higher fatality rate in men.

It seems this would rule out an issue with men and camel spit exposure (my band name). It’s not clear exactly why one sex is disproportionately affected, but a similar split occurs with SARS classic and COVID. These viruses aren’t a walk in the park for anyone, but statistically, they’re more than a smidge worse for the bros.

Before the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, warnings were put out against consuming raw camel milk or meat. Earlier that year, two cases were confirmed from drinking raw camel milk, resulting in one fatality. Two cases does not an epidemic make, but the disease is endemic in the camel population. Drop three million tourists into the country, you know one idiot’s gonna tongue kiss a camel for a tragically sick instagram shot if you don’t tell them not to.

So naturally, when headlines popped up about three members of the French soccer team having the ‘camel flu,’ it seemed like cause for alarm.

But was it?

There were three sick people with an apparent viral illness that was called the camel flu in that bastion of factual reporting, the Daily fucking Mail. Reporting it as the ‘camel flu’ was a pretty dishonest way to hint at a diagnosis of MERS for clicks. But during the world cup, nobody reported a confirmed case of MERS, let alone three. If there even were three players from France with the sniffles, they may have had COVID, the flu, or one of those things we had in the before times: a goddamn cold.

Thanks to my procrastination in moving these articles from facebook to here, we have the benefit of hindsight. Over 2,300 people were tested for MERS during the months of the World Cup, and there wasn’t a single positive test.

I sincerely hope my colleagues will chill the fuck out with sensationalist reporting about illnesses that nobody has fallen ill with. And to keep it that way, I hope we keep warning people not to tongue kiss a camel.

This has been your Moment of Science, also hoping y’all will commence discussion of #puppethistory.

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