Posted BY: R.M | NwoReport
Massachusetts health officials and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed the first human case of monkeypox on Wednesday, in an adult male that had recently traveled to Canada.
It is the first confirmed U.S. cases of the virus this year, and the first since a man in Texas was hospitalized with it last summer.
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It comes the same day CDC officials said they were monitoring up to six potential cases of the virus after Americans were found to have traveled into the country on a plane that included another infected passenger.
Officials did not reveal whether this Massachusetts man was among the group of suspected cases.
The individuals sat within a three-row radius of a British passenger on a nearly seven-hour flight from Nigeria to the UK on May 4. He later became the country’s first confirmed case.
Dr Jennifer McQuiston, a senior official at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), told STAT News the U.S. patients would be monitored for 21 days.
A total of 12 cases have been confirmed in Europe so far in the global outbreak, with 24 people being probed for the virus across the UK, Portugal and Spain.
Infections are more common in central and west Africa, where they generally result from direct contact with infected animals.
But the virus can also be spread via direct contact with infectious lesions in the skin, or from the coughs and sneezes of someone with a monkeypox rash.
Up to one in 10 cases are fatal, but the strain spreading globally is milder and thought to have a fatality rate of about one in 100 — similar to Covid’s at the start of the pandemic.
