Spain reports MERS-CoV in returning Hajj traveler

 
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Lisa Schnirring | Staff Writer | CIDRAP News

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Nov 06, 2013

Spain's health ministry today reported the country's first Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) case, in a woman who had spent October in Saudi Arabia, a development that raises questions about possible exposure at the recent Hajj pilgrimage.
The woman is a Spanish resident who was born in Morocco and was admitted to a Madrid hospital on Nov 1, where she is in stable condition, according to a health ministry statement posted in Spanish. The virus was confirmed in samples tested at the country's National Microbiology Center.
Spain's health ministry said it considers the infection an imported case that doesn't pose a public health risk to Spain, which is now the fifth European country to report an imported MERS-CoV case, in addition to Britain, France, Germany, and Italy. All of the imported infections occurred in people who had recently traveled to Saudi Arabia or other Middle Eastern countries.
A World Health Organization (WHO) official told the Canadian Press today that the woman with MERS-CoV performed the Hajj pilgrimage, got sick in Saudi Arabia, and flew back to Spain where she was hospitalized and tested. Anthony Mounts, MD, the WHO's technical lead for MERS-CoV, said it's not clear yet if the woman took a commercial flight or came back on a charter plane, according to the story.
Spain's health ministry said it and Madrid health officials are identifying all of the woman's close contacts, based on national and international procedures.


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Over 300 earthquakes have struck the Gulf of Valencia over the past month, officials suspects an offshore gas storage facility

Spain sees link between quakes and offshore gas storage plant

A platform, part of the Castor Project, located in the Ebro Delta off the coast of Alcanar, stands at sea on October 2, 2013 (AFP, Lluis Gene)

Map

(AFP)

Madrid — Spain's government said Thursday that a wave of small earthquakes that have rattled the country's eastern coast could be caused by a large offshore gas storage plant.
Over 300 earthquakes have struck the Gulf of Valencia, a zone not normally known for seismic activity, over the past month, according to Spain's National Geographic Institute. The quakes have not caused any damage but have frightened residents.
The strongest, a 4.2 magnitude earthquake, hit in the early hours of Tuesday.
Two earthquakes measuring 4.1 struck the region late on Wednesday.
Environmentalists blame the earthquakes on the injection of gas into a giant underground gas storage facility located in the Gulf of Valencia but the government has up to now said there was no confirmed link.
The Castor storage plant aims to store gas in a depleted oil reservoir 1.7 kilometres (1.05 miles) under the Mediterranean Sea and send it via a pipeline to Spain's national grid.
"There seems to be a correlation, a direct relationship between the gas injection in the underground storage facility which is 22 kilometres from the coast and the microearthquakes that have occurred," Industry Minister Jose Manuel Soria said in an interview with radio Cadena Cope.
Spanish firm Escal UGS which owns and operated the Castor storage plant stopped injecting gas into the underground reservoir on June 16.

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