ORAL PRESENTATION Open Access Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus MERS Cov screening of exposed healthcare workers in a tertiary care hospital in Saudi Arabia K Alameer 1 B Abukhzam 2 W Khan 1 A El Saed 1 H Balkhy 1 From 3rd International Conference on Prevention and Infection Control ICPIC 2015 Geneva Switzerland 16 19 June 2015 Introduction The possibility of healthcare exposure to Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus MERS Cov has been early described Almost one third of the confirmed MERS Cov cases in Saudi Arabia were among health care workers HCWs Objectives To describe three season experience of MERS Cov exposure and outcome among HCWs in a tertiary care hospital in Saudi Arabia Methods Prospective surveillance was conducted in King Abdula ziz Medical City in Riyadh Saudi Arabia for unprotected exposed HCWs with every newly PCR confirmed MERS Cov case between June 2013 and March 2015 HCWs exposed to confirmed MERS Cov patients were examined for the presence of symptoms and nasopharyn geal and rarely other swab was obtained for MERS Cov Exposure was defined as caring of or being in close proxi mity within 2 meters of a confirmed patient without proper personal protective equipment PPE Results During the duration covered a total 32 patients with PCR confirmed MERS Cov were associated with expo sure of 1361 HCWs Only 328 24 1 of the exposed HCWs had symptoms suggestive of respiratory infection at the time of screening MERS Cov was confirmed in only 14 1 03 HCWs MERS Cov confirmation was roughly similar among symptomatic 3 328 0 91 and asymptomatic 11 1033 1 06 HCWs Only 2 14 3 of the 14 confirmed HCWs required hospitalization While the mortality among the confirmed patients was very high 21 32 65 6 none of the 14 confirmed healthcare workers died Conclusion We are reporting high potential of healthcare exposure to MERS Cov in the healthcare setting but a very low trans mission rate Proper compliance with PPEs is essential to further reduce unprotected exposure of the HCWS In essence contact tracing and testing for all unprotected exposed HCWs to MERS CoV irrespective of symptoms remain critical measures to prevent or reduce the impact of MERS Cov hospital outbreak till further understand ing of MERS Cov behavior is delineated Disclosure of interest None declared Authors details 1 Infection Prevention and Control Riyadh Saudi Arabia 2 King Abdulaziz Medical City Riyadh Saudi Arabia Published 16 June 2015 doi 10 1186 2047 2994 4 S1 O57 Cite this article as Alameer et al Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus MERS Cov screening of exposed healthcare workers in a tertiary care hospital in Saudi Arabia Antimicrobial Resistance and Infection Control 2015 4 Suppl 1 O57 1 Infection Prevention and Control Riyadh Saudi Arabia Full list of author information is available at the end of the article Alameer et al Antimicrobial Resistance and Infection Control 2015 4 Suppl 1 O57 2015 Alameer et al licensee BioMed Central Ltd This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http creativecommons org licenses by 4 0 which permits unrestricted use distribution and reproduction in any medium provided the original work is properly cited The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver http creativecommons org publicdomain zero 1 0 applies to the data made available in this article unless otherwise stated