3 additional measles virus infectees in Incheon and Ansan

2019-02-03 25

South Korea has confirmed three more cases of measles this weekend... in an outbreak that's grown to almost 50 cases.
The authorities are tracking down people who've been in close contact with the infected people to keep it from spreading.
Hong Yoo has the details.
On Sunday, one case was confirmed in the city of Incheon... and two more on Saturday in Ansan.
Those three bring the total number of measles cases in South Korea to 48.

The Incheon city government says the person infected is a woman from Kazakhstan who had come back from a business trip to Ukraine, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan.
She landed at Incheon Saturday morning on an Asiana Airlines flight from Almaty.
Last Monday, while abroad, she went to hospital with a rash and sore throat.
She reported her symptoms right after she landed at Incheon and was taken to a hospital to be treated in isolation.
The local government is verifying the locations of 183 people who were on the same plane as the woman... to vaccinate and to monitor them for 24 hours.

In Ansan, the two cases of measles were a three-year-old boy and a woman in her twenties, bringing the the number of patients in Ansan alone to 17.
The boy is the son of another person already diagnosed with measles,... and so he was being monitored,... and the woman is a nurse working at a medical center... where she came into contact with another infected person.

The first case was diagnosed in December in the city of Daegu, which has the second-highest number of cases.
To prevent the further spread of the virus, the authorities are monitoring nearly 3-thousand people who have been in contact with the infected patients and they have vaccinated more than 7,500.
Hong Yoo, Arirang News.