Importance of Specimen Type and Quality in Diagnosing Middle East Respiratory Syndrome

Dear Editor, From May to July 2015, there was a hospital-associated outbreak in South Korea reporting 186 laboratory-confirmed cases. Highly sensitive and specific laboratory diagnostic tests are important for the control of Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) outbreaks. Clinical guidelines for the molecular diagnosis of MERS-CoV are based on the interim recommendations from the WHO, the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (US CDC), and other available resources [1-4]. To date, only a few studies have reported the molecular detection of this disease during an outbreak [5-8]. To validate the current guidelines for MERS-CoV laboratory testing, we retrospectively reviewed the results of MERS-CoV real-time reverse transcription (rRT)-PCR assays in the Korean tertiary care hospital with the largest number of MERS cases (Samsung Medical Center). The Institutional Review Board of the Samsung Medical Center (IRB #2015-06-201) approved this study. KCI Citation Count: 5