New Delhi: Two days after the World Health Organisation declared the mpox outbreak a public health emergency of international concern, Pakistan has recorded three cases of mpox in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
Dawn has reported that the country’s National Command and Operation Centre (NCOC) has issued an advisory on measures to deal with the disease. The report says that it is likely that the cases are all old variants.
This comes after the BBC reported that Sweden’s public health agency has recorded what it says is the first case of a more dangerous type of mpox outside the African continent. The person became infected during a stay in an area of Africa where there is currently a major outbreak of mpox Clade 1, the agency said.
WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus’s declaration came after an upsurge of mpox in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and a growing number of countries in Africa.
The WHO had said that the public health emergency of international concern or PHEIC has “potential to spread further across countries in Africa and possibly outside the continent.”
Caused by an Orthopoxvirus, mpox was first detected in humans in 1970, in the DRC. The disease is considered endemic to countries in central and west Africa.
In July 2022, the multi-country outbreak of mpox was declared a PHEIC as it spread rapidly via sexual contact across a range of countries where the virus had not been seen before, the WHO notes. That PHEIC was declared over in May 2023 after there had been a sustained decline in global cases.
