According to a Tuesday announcement from Pakistan’s Ministry of National Health Services Regulation and Coordination, the nation’s first two cases of monkeypox were found in visitors who had entered the country from overseas.
According to health ministry representatives speaking to media, an individual with symptoms of monkeypox was deported from Saudi Arabia and arrived in Pakistan on April 17. On the flight, he shared a seat with another passenger who had mpox symptoms.
The National Institute of Health (NIH), Islamabad, received the samples of the individuals, whose identities have been kept secret, and a day earlier, the facility had verified that they were carriers of the contagious virus.
The patients are inhabitants of either Rawalpindi or Islamabad, the officials continued, and their families are currently being screened and urged to remain in quarantine in order to prevent the virus from spreading. The government has also started contract tracing.
Both of them are claimed to be in stable condition, with one having been quarantined at their house while the other was deported from Saudi Arabia and transferred to the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences in the federal capital.
They said that following the discovery of the virus, airports all around the nation had been placed on high alert, and that the ministry had sent samples from suspicious cases to the NIH.
Monkeypox is a viral disease brought on by the monkeypox virus, a kind of the orthopoxvirus genus. There are two distinct clades: clade I and clade II.
According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), monkeypox, also known as mpox, typically presents with a skin rash or mucosal lesions that can last 2-4 weeks along with fever, headache, muscle aches, back pain, low energy, and enlarged lymph nodes.
Humans can contract the mpox virus through coming into personal contact with a diseased person, contaminated objects, or infected animals.
