Pakistan announced Friday that it had increased the monitoring of travelers arriving from other countries after detecting the first case of the contagious variant of the mpox virus currently spreading in central and eastern Africa.
The South Asian nation, with a population of about 245 million, reported the infection following the World Health Organization's declaration of the disease as a global public health emergency on Wednesday.
“The first case of mpox has been confirmed in Pakistan,” said an announcement Friday by the health ministry in the national capital of Islamabad. It stated that the victim had recently arrived from a Gulf country but did not share further details.
“Contact tracing efforts for the infected individual have already commenced, with additional samples being collected from potential contacts,” the statement quoted Sajid Hussain Shah, the ministry spokesperson. It identified the male patient as a resident of Mardan district in the northwestern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, which borders Afghanistan.
The Pakistani federal health ministry has instructed authorities to enhance monitoring at all border crossing points and airports. They are also required to collect samples for testing from passengers returning from abroad with suspected mpox symptoms, the statement said.
It was not immediately known which Gulf country the affected Pakistani citizen had visited, and no cases of the new mpox variant have yet been reported in that region.
However, the WHO has documented 16 confirmed cases of mpox in the United Arab Emirates since 2022. Transnational outbreaks affect the UAE because of its role as a hub connecting the East and West, facilitated by its long-haul carriers, Emirates and Etihad.
Sweden also reported a contagious form of mpox on Thursday.
The Pakistani and the Swedish cases mark the first known strain infections outside of Africa.
Wednesday’s WHO declaration stemmed from an outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo that spread to at least 12 other countries in central and eastern Africa — with cases up 160% over last year and deaths up by 19%.
The WHO has declared mpox a global public health emergency for the second time in two years.
The United Nations agency made the same declaration in 2022 when the disease was still called monkeypox. Back then, the global outbreak of what was identified as clade 2 affected nearly 100,000 people around the world, especially gay and bisexual men.
The WHO has reported more than 14,000 mpox cases and 524 deaths in Africa this year. Health experts have identified the virus as clade 1b, an offshoot of clade 2.
It can cause flu-like symptoms such as fever, chills, and a rash with painful lesions. Experts say symptoms last about two to four weeks and often disappear independently. Unlike COVID-19, mpox is not airborne and tends to require close contact — like contact with the skin or fluids of an infected person — to spread.
Some information in the story was provided by The Associated Press.
