Second case of deadly MERS virus reported in the U.S.

Florida state and federal health officials have confirmed a second U.S. case of a deadly virus that has sickened hundreds and killed scores in the Middle East.

Officials with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said Monday the sickened individual was a 44-year-old health care provider who resides and works in Saudi Arabia and was in Florida to visit family.

The patient in the case, which is unrelated to a previous U.S. infection recorded in Indiana earlier this month, remains hospitalized but is doing well, officials said. 

Officials said that from May 1, the patient traveled from Jeddah in Saudi Arabia to London, then Boston and Atlanta before arriving in Orlando. During that time he would have come into contact with more than 500 people, it is believed. Health officials said the patient was feeling ill on the flight from Jeddah, but did not feel sick enough to seek treatment until last Friday. 

Out of what health officials stressed was an "abundance of caution," those flight passengers are being contacted and told what symptoms to be on the lookout for. Thus far, no one else appears to have been infected, officials said.

Health officials also said that additional cases in the U.S. were inevitable, but cautioned that the transmission of MERS required close contact and that the risk to the public remained "very low."

The first U.S. case involved a healthcare worker who had traveled to Riyadh and traveled to Indiana earlier this month. He has since been released from the hospital and is considered "fully recovered," according to the Indiana Health Department.

However, despite the two cases in the U.S., experts say much is still unknown about how MERS will impact the country. 

"At this point, it's really unclear how many more cases like this we are going to see. Each of them by themselves do not constitute a major public health threat if there is no additional transmission," Professor Michael T. Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, told Al Jazeera.  

MERS is a viral respiratory illness in which patients can develop severe acute respiratory illness with symptoms that include fever, cough, and shortness of breath, according to the CDC, which said 30 percent of those who contracted it have died.  

"Each of these cases are kind of a throw at the genetic roulette table and we can only hope that they don't result in extensive transmission, but we won't know for some days after they're documented," Osterholm said.

The virus first emerged in Saudi Arabia in 2012 and recent research has suggested it may originate in camels. Federal health officials said that since 2012, 538 confirmed cases of MERS, including 145 deaths, have been reported to the World Health Organization (WHO). Of those, Saudi Arabia has reported 450 cases, including 118 deaths.

WHO is planning to hold an emergency meeting Tuesday to discuss the MERS crisis.

Also on Monday, it was confirmed that a man in Jordan who worked in a private hospital died after being infected with the MERS virus, bringing to the death total in the country up to five. 

Stanley Perlman, a professor of microbiology at the University of Iowa, told Al Jazeera that despite the deaths so far recorded and fear about the virus spreading, there were reasons to suggest that a far wider outbreak among the larger population would not take place.

“Thus far, [MERS] has spread only in health care settings or family settings and [there is] no evidence for community spread,” he said. “The most important thing is that people don’t panic.” 

With wire services