The United Nations' World Health Organization (WHO) said Thursday that the US IHR National Focal Point has informed it of the third laboratory-confirmed case of human infection with Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS-CoV) in the country.

Incidentally, the latest case is the first confirmed case of the disease being transmitted within the country. In the previous two cases, patients had flown into the US after getting infected outside the nation. Both of them were working in Saudi Arabia when they were infected.

As part of the investigation of contacts of the first confirmed case, testing for MERS-CoV was undertaken on contacts. WHO said a contact of the first case initially tested negative for MERS-CoV by PCR based on respiratory tract samples taken 10 days after contact with the first case.

"However, on May 16, this contact tested positive for antibodies for MERS-CoV in a blood sample taken 14 days after contact. Currently, this individual is asymptomatic. He is a male in his 70s with comorbidities and has no history of travel to countries outside the United States," the UN agency added.

The antibody test result suggests this individual may have been infected with MERS-CoV; however, he does not meet WHO's current definition of a laboratory confirmed case of MERS-CoV, which requires positive PCR tests.

Coronaviruses are a family of viruses that can cause a range of ailments from the common cold to severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), which became an epidemic in 2003. The virus could be transmitted between people in close and prolonged contact. The sources of infection for the new coronavirus are still unclear.

The deadly Novel Coronavirus (NCoV) strain, recently renamed MERS-CoV, reflects the fact that most of the reported cases are from that region, mainly Saudi Arabia.

Nevertheless, France, Germany, Jordan, Italy, the Netherlands, Tunisia and the United Kingdom have also reported laboratory-confirmed cases of MERS-CoV infections. Those patients were either transferred there for care of the disease or returned from the Middle East and subsequently became ill.

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