Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus Recombination and the Evolution of Science and Public Health in China

have received a laboratory diagnosis ofMERS and over 450 people have died. Most of the cases have been documented on the Ara-bianPeninsula; however, sporadic cases have also been reported in Europe and Asia in travelers returning from the Middle East. Ex-cept in South Korea, the importedMERS-CoV has not established a substantive chain of infection beyond the index traveler case. The spread within South Korea to 186 people, resulting in 36 deaths, has been attributed to a delay in diagnosis and isolation of the index case, lapses in infection control, and care of patients by family members rather than trained medical staff. This interpre-tationwas supported by a preliminary report fromaWorldHealth Organization panel wherein nomutations linked to transmissibil-ity or pathogenesis were found in sequences obtained in South Korea and China. However, in a recent mBio article, Wang and colleagues report detailed genomic analysis of the virus implicate