NEW DELHI: Indian authorities reported on Monday Asia’s first possible monkeypox fatality after the death of a man who recently returned from United Arab Emirates testing positive.
Kerala state’s health ministry said tests on the 22-year-old “showed that the man had monkeypox.”
Three monkeypox-related fatalities have so far been reported outside Africa in an outbreak that the World Health Organization has declared a global health emergency.
The Indian man died in Kerala on July 30 around a week after returning from the UAE and being taken to hospital.
It was unclear however whether monkeypox was the cause of death.
“The youth had no symptoms of monkeypox. He had been admitted to a hospital with symptoms of encephalitis and fatigue,” the Indian Express daily quoted Kerala’s health minister Veena George as saying on Sunday.
Twenty people identified as high risk of infection were being kept under observation, she added, including family members, friends who played football with the man and medical staff.
According to the WHO, more than 18,000 monkeypox cases have been detected throughout the world outside Africa since the beginning of May, most of them in Europe.
Spain last week recorded two monkeypox-related deaths and Brazil one.
It is however unclear if monkeypox actually caused the three fatalities, with Spanish authorities as of Sunday still carrying out autopsies and Brazilian authorities saying its deceased patient had other “serious conditions.”
The WHO’s European office said on Saturday that more monkeypox-related deaths can be expected.
“With the continued spread of monkeypox in Europe, we will expect to see more deaths,” Catherine Smallwood, Senior Emergency Officer at WHO Europe, said in a statement.
The goal needs to be “interrupting transmission quickly in Europe and stopping this outbreak,” she said.
India has reported at least four cases, with the first recorded on July 15 in another man who returned to Kerala from the UAE.
Kerala’s health ministry said in its statement on Monday that a high-level team from the state medical board would probe the death.
Primary tests from the National Institute of Virology in the city of Pune showed that the man had the variant from West Africa and that more genetic tests would be conducted.
“The disease is nobody’s fault. Those who have symptoms should inform the health department so that the spread can be contained,” the ministry said, adding that there was “no need to panic.”
It added that the man’s family only informed doctors on July 30 result of tests conducted in Dubai on July 19, by which time he was in a critical condition.
It added that there were 165 passengers on the same flight from UAE but that “nobody is a close contact.”
Monkeypox, so called because it was first discovered in a monkey, is related to the deadly smallpox virus, which was eradicated in 1980, but is far less severe.
Early signs of the disease include a high fever, swollen lymph glands and a chickenpox-like rash.
In May 2022, a flurry of cases was detected in countries outside Africa in people with no travel links to the region.
The WHO last month declared the outbreak to be a global health emergency — the highest alarm it can sound.
India reports Asia’s first possible monkeypox death
https://arab.news/cwzdg
India reports Asia’s first possible monkeypox death
- Kerala state’s health ministry said tests on the 22-year-old “showed that the man had monkeypox”
- Three monkeypox-related fatalities have so far been reported outside Africa
After nearly 7 weeks and many rumors, Bolivia’s ex-leader reappears in his stronghold
- Morales was Bolivia’s first Indigenous president who served from 2006 until his fraught 2019 ouster and subsequent self-exile
- He dismissed rumors fueled by local politicians and fanned by social media that he would try to flee the country
LA PAZ: Bolivia’s long-serving socialist former leader, Evo Morales, reappeared Thursday in his political stronghold of the tropics after almost seven weeks of unexplained absence, endorsing candidates for upcoming regional elections and quieting rumors he had fled the country in the wake of the US seizure of his ally, Venezuela’s ex-President Nicolás Maduro.
The weeks of hand-wringing over Morales’ fate showed how little the Andean country knows about what’s happening in the remote Chapare region, where the former president has spent the past year evading an arrest warrant on human trafficking charges, and how vulnerable it is to fears about US President Donald Trump’s potential future foreign escapades.
The media outlet of Morales’ coca-growing union, Radio Kawsachun Coca, released footage of Morales smiling in dark sunglasses as he arrived via tractor at a stadium in the central Bolivian town of Chimoré to address his supporters.
Morales, Bolivia’s first Indigenous president who served from 2006 until his fraught 2019 ouster and subsequent self-exile, explained that he had come down with chikungunya, a mosquito-borne ailment with no treatment that causes fever and severe joint pain, and suffered complications that “caught me by surprise.”
“Take care of yourselves against chikungunya — it is serious,” the 66-year-old Morales said, appearing markedly more frail than in past appearances.
He dismissed rumors fueled by local politicians and fanned by social media that he would try to flee the country, vowing to remain in Bolivia despite the threat of arrest under conservative President Rodrigo Paz, whose election last October ended nearly two decades of rule by Morales’ Movement Toward Socialism party.
“Some media said, ‘Evo is going to leave, Evo is going to flee.’ I said clearly: I am not going to leave. I will stay with the people to defend the homeland,” he said.
Paz’s revival of diplomatic ties with the US and recent efforts to bring back the Drug Enforcement Administration — some 17 years after Morales expelled American anti-drug agents from the Andean country while cozying up to China, Russia, Cuba and Iran — have rattled the coca-growing region that serves as Morales’ bastion of support.
Paz on Thursday confirmed that he would meet Trump in Miami on March 7 for a summit convening politically aligned Latin American leaders as the Trump administration seeks to counter Chinese influence and assert US dominance in the region.
Before proclaiming the candidates he would endorse in Bolivia’s municipal and regional elections next month, Morales launched into a lengthy speech reminiscent of his once-frequent diatribes against US imperialism.
“This is geopolitical propaganda on an international scale,” he said of Trump’s bid to revive the Monroe Doctrine from 1823 in order to reassert American dominance in the Western Hemisphere. “They want to eliminate every left-wing party in Latin America.”
