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| Keiji Fukuda, assistant director-general for health security at the World Health Organization, passes through the fever check point at Incheon International Airport along with his colleagues, Monday. The WHO team will work with the Korean government to examine the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome epidemic in Korea. / Yonhap |
By Kim Rahn
An international team of epidemiologists arrived here, Monday, to help fight the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) epidemic.
The Ministry of Health and Welfare said the experts from the World Health Organization (WHO) will work with the government for five days from Tuesday until Saturday. They will give a news conference Saturday.
"The government and WHO agreed on the joint mission, considering global concerns over the epidemiologic pattern here, which is quite different from that in Saudi Arabia and other countries," a ministry official said.
"According to the International Health Regulation, the WHO can conduct on-site inspections with the government of a country to help stop the spread of a disease overseas, or other issues that may require global cooperation," he said. "The joint team will collect necessary information to fight the disease."
The joint mission will have 16 members — eight from the WHO delegation and eight from Korea. Keiji Fukuda, assistant director-general for health security at the WHO, and Lee Jong-koo, director of Seoul National University's JW Lee Center for Global Medicine, will co-head the mission.
The foreign delegation is comprised of experts in epidemiology, virology, clinical management, infection prevention and control from WHO headquarters, its Western Pacific Regional Office (WPRO), and experts from China and Hong Kong.
They are: Li Ailan, director of WPRO's division of health security and emergencies; Kidong Park, team leader of the WPRO's country support unit; Abdullah Assiri, infection prevention and control director of the Saudi Arabian Ministry of Health; David Hui, professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong; Maria Van Kerkove, technical consultant for the global capacities, alert and response cluster of the WHO; Malik Peilis, director of the WHO H5 Reference Laboratory at the University of Hong Kong; and Martin Cetron, director of global migration and quarantine division at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Besides Lee, the Korean members are five professors and two officials from the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC).
The team will visit the KCDC headquarters in Osong, North Chungcheong Province, and Pyeongtaek St. Mary's Hospital in Pyeongtaek, Gyeonggi Province, where Korea's first MERS patient stayed and spread the virus.
At the hospital and other quarantine facilities, the members will gain information about how the virus spread.
WHO Director-General Margaret Chan said that the joint mission between WHO and Korean government will assess the latter's measures against MERS and discuss additional measures or strategic adjustments.
In an interview with Yonhap News Agency, she said that one of the team's missions is to find out why the disease has spread so rapidly in Korea, adding that one possible reason for the spread within hospitals may be Korean culture that family members attend patients.
Chan said that when a new disease appears and arrives in a country, medical experts there cannot deal with it properly at first as they do not understand the mechanism.
But she added that Korea has strong scientific knowledge and research ability, so she expects the country to control the situation soon if proper public hygiene measures are taken.
