UNTIL recent weeks, Mers (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome) had been a vaguely vexing but still distant disease, yet another troubling outbreak in "another part of the world". Then came the first confirmed case in South Korea four weeks ago, and the unfortunate escalation of the epidemic in the country since.

Before the first South Korean Mers patient brought the coronavirus to his country in early May after a business trip to Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, Mers - first identified in humans in 2012 in Saudi Arabia - had largely been confined to the Middle East. Up till then, there had been around 1,130 Mers cases, with a death rate of about 38 per cent, but no signs of transmission outside the Arabian Peninsula, even in the several countries with isolated cases imported from the region.

South Korea has to date reported 162 Mers cases and 20 deaths, and more than 6,500 people are in quarantine. While the World Health Organization (WHO) has called the South Korean outbreak "large and complex", its rapid expansion can be blamed on a few failures, including initial mismanagement - the first patient's symptoms were initially overlooked, there was apparently a lack of knowledge about the virus when he was hospitalised, and he in fact visited four health facilities seeking treatment, inadvertently triggering exposure and sparking a chain of infection to hospital patients (and others), who passed the virus on when they hospital-hopped. Quarantine wasn't taken seriously, it seems - one man under confinement flew to Hong Kong and took a bus to southern China, and was later diagnosed with Mers, while another person, instead of staying home in Seoul, was found on a golf course. As the Mers cases soared, South Korea closed schools nationwide, even though the outbreak is largely clustered around hospitals.