WHO EMRO

The WHO Eastern Mediterranean Regional Office (EMRO) is one of WHO's six regional offices, headquartered in Cairo, Egypt, and covering 21 member states across the Middle East, North Africa, the Horn of Africa and Central Asia. It serves as the primary WHO surveillance and notification body for the MERS-CoV endemic zone, issuing the case notification reports under the International Health Regulations (IHR) that form the global early-warning record for Middle East respiratory syndrome. EMRO's disease intelligence mandate covers cholera, polio, plague, viral haemorrhagic fevers, and emerging respiratory pathogens; its geographic footprint includes most of the active MERS-CoV camel-reservoir states and several countries with limited laboratory capacity.

In the pandemics-and-biosecurity context, EMRO is the reporting source for two new MERS-CoV cases identified since 4 May 2026, including one death in Saudi Arabia, bringing the 2026 Saudi total to two cases and one death. No sustained human-to-human transmission was found; both cases are consistent with zoonotic (camel) exposure. The ECDC assessed EU risk as very low on the basis of the EMRO report. MERS-CoV has maintained a fatality rate of approximately 35% in confirmed cases globally since the first outbreak in 2012, with Saudi Arabia accounting for the large majority of all cases recorded. Dromedary camels remain the animal reservoir; human cases arise principally from direct animal contact or from healthcare settings with inadequate infection control.

EMRO operates under heightened pressure in 2026 given concurrent health emergencies in several of its member states, including conflict-affected zones with disrupted surveillance capacity. Its role as the IHR-mandated reporting channel for MERS means that any case with pandemic-risk potential in the Gulf region will first appear in an EMRO notification before WHO Headquarters issues a global Disease Outbreak Notice.