No new cases and no new deaths with respect to the MERS-CoV outbreak in South Korea for 3 days now.

MERS-CoV cases in South Korea according to date of confirmation and hospitals involved.

In other related news, a humanised mouse model for MERS infection and a process that can be used to rapidly produce clinical-grade antibodies against the virus has been published in PNAS by a group from the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

There’s also an early publication about the MERS outbreak in South Korea in the Eurosurveillance journal, with a comparison to SARS. It is not published by any of the Koreans however, but by investigators from the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Infectious Disease Epidemiology and Control in Hong Kong. Probably nothing criminally or ethically wrong, but it does seem somewhat in bad taste to jump the gun ahead of the Koreans in publishing epidemiological analyses about their own epidemic, especially when the South Koreans have been very open and prompt about providing updates and data.