After the World Health Organization declared Mpox as a threat to global public health, officials in Pakistan also say that the presence of a new patient has been confirmed in the country.
According to the spokesperson of the Federal Ministry of Health, the patient in whom this virus was found this week belongs to Mardan district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, who had returned from the Gulf countries.
It is not yet clear which strain of Mpox the said patient contracted and whether it is the same variant that was first confirmed outside of Africa in Sweden.
Contact tracing of the affected person has been started and samples of more people are being obtained, the spokesman said.
According to the Director of Public Health of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Irshad Roghani, three people have been confirmed with m-pox in the province so far, but two of them are old cases, and only one patient has been confirmed this week.
According to him, isolation wards are being prepared for m-pox patients. It should be noted that people affected by this disease have come forward in Pakistan in the past as well.
Pakistan’s Ministry of Health has also issued an advisory on the disease on Thursday, which states that “the screening system at airports and entry points is being further strengthened.”
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Prime Minister’s Coordinator for Health, Dr Mukhtar Ahmed Bharath, says that federal hospitals have been instructed to take precautionary measures, and the Ministry of Health and Border Health Services are “alert to deal with any kind of situation.”
It should be recalled that the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the outbreak of Mpox in parts of Africa as a cause of international concern and a threat to public health.
The highly contagious disease, formerly known as ‘monkey pox’, killed at least 450 people in the Republic of Congo.
M pox disease is caused by the monkey pox virus. It belongs to the same group of viruses as smallpox but is less harmful.
This virus was originally transmitted from animals to humans, but now it is also transmitted from humans to humans.
It is most common in remote villages in the forests of Africa in countries such as the Republic of Congo. Thousands of cases and hundreds of deaths occur every year in these areas, with children under the age of 15 being the most affected.