A Febrile Return from Mecca: is it the obvious?

Author Info

Amos M Yinnon Ramzi Kurd Reuven Friedmann Yael M. Szterenlicht

Corresponding Author

Amos M Yinnon
Internal Medicine, Shaare Zedek Medical Center, affiliated with the Hebrew-University-Hadassah Medical School, Jerusalem, Israel

A B S T R A C T

We describe a 53-year-old female patient with diabetes mellitus and mild hypertension who made the ritual Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca. On the return trip to Jerusalem, she developed a respiratory illness, high fever and chills. We describe the initial and subsequent management of this patient, epidemiological aspects and the surprising final diagnosis. The take-home messages are: first, emergency department staff should demonstrate a high index of suspicion and put patients in isolation who meet specific case definition criteria. Second, even if a certain disease, in this instance MERS-CoV is the obvious diagnosis, open-mindedness and a differential diagnosis are always necessary in order to avoid misdiagnosis.

Article Info

Article Type

Case Report

Publication history

Received: Thu 20, Dec 2018
Accepted: Wed 16, Jan 2019
Published: Wed 30, Jan 2019

Copyright

© 2023 Amos M Yinnon. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Hosting by Science Repository.
DOI: 10.31487/j.CMR.2018.01.002