WHO convenes emergency meeting on Mers coronavirus

Director-general of the World Health Organisation convenes emergency committee meeting to help protect travellers to the annual Haj pilgrimage.

Margaret Chan, the director-general of the World Health Organisation, said yesterday that she had decided to convene the agency's emergency committee, for just the second time, to help protect travellers to the annual Haj pilgrimage from the coronavirus that has killed 38 people in Saudi Arabia.

The 15-member committee, which includes the deputy health minister of Saudi Arabia, Ziad Memish, and health officials from six other predominantly Muslim countries, will meet via teleconference today to decide whether the Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (Mers-CoV) represents a public health emergency of international concern.

Ms Chan last convened the committee to battle the 2009 global flu pandemic.

"Millions of people are going to Mecca and to Medina - we cannot stop that and we should not stop that," said Ms Chan at the WHO's headquarters in Geneva.

"We need to say that it's OK to go, but these are the measures that governments must take."

The previously unknown virus has infected 80 people and killed 45 worldwide, according to the WHO. While most cases have been detected in Saudi Arabia, infections in the UK, France, Germany and Italy have sparked concern of a global outbreak similar to the 2003 Sars epidemic.

Scientists still don't know where the new virus came from or how it is spreading.

That prompted Ms Chan to say at the WHO's annual World Health Assembly in May that the virus is her "greatest concern".

While the pace of new infections has slowed, Ms Chan said she wanted to be prepared in case it returns.

"Am I still worried? The answer is yes," she said. "Eventually I hope the disease will burn out. But what if it doesn't? We should always have plan A, plan B and plan C."

Ms Chan, who fought Sars when she was the director of health in Hong Kong a decade ago, said the lessons from that outbreak may have helped prevent Mers-CoV from becoming worse.

"We have learnt from Sars, if you limit the population's exposure, the disease will die out on its own," she said. "We just hope that this is also what we are seeing.

"I have learnt from too many occasions in the last 40 years in public health. I never let down my guard."