More Reason for Calm Than Panic in South Korea's MERS Scare

Sales of surgical masks are booming in South Korea because of fears of a deadly, poorly understood virus. Airlines have announced "intensified sanitizing operations." More than 900 schools ave closed close and 16-hundred people are quarantined. And it's not just people. Seventeen camels in zoos also are quarantined.
The current frenzy in South Korea is due to MERS, which stands for Middle East Respiratory Syndrome. Media reports are making things worse.
And health care workers and government officials arecstrugging to understand and contain the diseases, sometimes downplaying the danger, sometimes inadvertently hyping it. South Korea has seen 35 cases and two deaths, the largest outbreak in the world outside of Saudi Arabia, where most of the more than 1,100 cases have been and where the disease was first seen in 2012. The World Health Organization said this week that the cases are linked to a 68-year-old man who traveled to the Middle East and returned to South Korea last month.