Back to 21 countries with MERS....still no party ensues

Well, it looks like some of us jumped the gun and did not tick all of our self-imposed quality assurance boxes. Yes, definitely including me.

With the sample(s) from a Bangladeshi expatriate apparently testing negative at a second laboratory, the previous comments by Prof. Mahmudur Rahman announcing a MERS-CoV positive traveller returning form eh USA via the UAE, seem to have lacked solid support from reliable laboratory analysis. It certainly makes more sense for the test result to be a false positive than the alternative; a very strange concurrence of circumstances which lead to the MERS-CoV infection that was announced.

Since it was never formally announced, it may never be formally retracted, but it would be nice to know precisely what led to the positive result and how things proceeded from there.

So this puts another of those wonderfully wild, hypothesis-generating, hand-waving MERSmoments where we tried to bend reality into a shape capable of fitting in the box made out of everyone's overly eager need to report things fast and first....behind us.

Nothing to see here. Move along. D'Oh.

Click on map to enlarge.