Mpox is rising in Pakistan as three patients have been diagnosed with the disease in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the provincial health authorities confirmed on Friday.
The first case of the disease this year in Pakistan was reported on Thursday, a day after the World Health Organization (WHO) had announced the ongoing Mpox outbreak in Africa a global health emergency — the highest level of alarm under international health law, CNN reported.
Mpox is a viral disease related to the now-eliminated smallpox virus and can spread through any close contact and through contaminated materials like sheets, clothing and needles, according to WHO.
Also read: Zika virus presence confirmed in Pakistan
The department further said that the patients who diagnosed with the virus were recently arrived from an Arab country.
However, it is important to know whether this recent rise in Mpox case is risky or will it subside with time without big impact.
Is it dangerous?
The United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has said that while some outbreaks of clade I Mpox have killed up to 10% of people who get sick, more recent wave have had lower death rates.
The fatality rate for clade II is less than 0.2%.
It is dangerous for infants, people with severely weakened immune systems and pregnant women.
According to Dr Daniel Bausch, senior adviser for global health security at FIND, a global nonprofit focused on health equity, believes that surveillance of Mpox is quite incomplete and there’s much more to learn.
“This is a virus that is in the environment and presumably maintained in small mammals in Africa, and we don’t have the proper diagnostics, really,” he said.
“It’s not necessarily hard to diagnose mpox infection when you have a laboratory right next to you, and skilled laboratory workers, and the technology. But of course, most of these cases are often seen in very rural areas, so trying to get a sample and get it to a laboratory is a difficult thing.”
Our understanding of transmissibility and fatality risk may be skewed by limitations that tend to detect only the most severe cases, he said.
Waht are the Symptoms of Mpox?
Initial symptoms are typically flu-like that include fever, chills, exhaustion, headache and muscle weakness.
They are often followed by a painful or itchy rash with raised lesions that scab over and resolve over a period of weeks.
