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Date Published: 15/08/2024

Mpox infection reported in Murcia as WHO declares international health emergency

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Experts believe the new variant spreading through 9 regions of Spain is ten times more deadly

Mpox infection reported in Murcia as WHO declares international health emergency

Just one day after the WHO declared an international health emergency due to the rapid spread of mpox, formerly known as monkeypox, through Africa, the Spanish Ministry of Health has revealed that the highly infectious disease was detected in a patient in the Region of Murcia last month.

Despite widespread warnings that the virus could easily travel from neighbouring Africa to Spain, this worrying news was only made public by the authorities on Thursday August 15. What’s more, mpox infections have been confirmed in eight other regions in the last 30 days: Madrid (116 cases), Andalucía (67), Catalonia (22), Balearic Islands (10), Valencian Community (11), Galicia (6), Castilla la Mancha (6), Basque Country (5), Castilla y León (3), Canary Islands (3) and Extremadura (1).

The Ministry has since announced that a technical group meeting will take place on Monday August 19 to discuss the plan of attack in dealing with this outbreak.

Since the beginning of the outbreak in 2022, a total of 8,104 confirmed cases of mpox infection have been reported in Spain in 17 autonomous communities.

This year, up to August 8, a total of 264 cases of mpox have been reported to the National Epidemiological Surveillance Network (Renave), the majority of infections in men with a median age of 37 years and born in Spain.

So while Spain is no stranger to the disease, what is most alarming this time around, according to Francisco Javier Membrillo, vice president of the Spanish Society of Infectious Diseases and Clinical Microbiology (Seimc), is the new strain’s potential lethality.

“What worries us is not specifically the resurgence, but that it is a different variant of the virus than the one that has circulated for the past two years. It had not been associated with contact related to sexual relations and presents up to ten times more cases of serious illness and mortality.”

In other news: Woman dies of mosquito-borne West Nile Virus in Andalucía

Images: Ministry of Health

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