With 18 confirmed cases of the Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) confirmed in South Korea, the country's government isolated hundreds of people possibly infected.
According to Reuters, South Korea confirmed 18 cases of MERS in the last 10 days, all related to a 68-year-old man who had recently traveled to Bahrain and Qatar. The 18 people infected were all family members or other patients who visited the man in the hospital.
South Korea's Health Ministry confirmed a 58-year-old woman was one of those who had contact with the man, but she died of respiratory failure. The country has now placed nearly 700 people in isolation after a 44-year-old left his voluntary quarantine to travel to Hong Kong and China.
The hundreds in isolation could face a travel ban as a result, as the 44-year-old man was China's first case of MERS.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has counted "1154 laboratory-confirmed cases" of MERS since it was first identified in humans in 2012. The WHO included approximately 431 have died from infection.
MERS was first spotted in Saudi Arabia in 2012 and the first few human cases were traced to camels and bats. South Korea now has the fourth-most cases of MERS in the world, behind Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Jordan.
The Associated Press identified the 44-year-old man who traveled to China as the son of one of the patients confirmed to have MERS. Authorities quarantined 18 people who sat near the man on the plane, but none showed any symptoms.
The South Korean Health Ministry acknowledged their number of isolations could rise in the near future.
