Health Minister Fahrettin Koca announced Thursday that Turkey’s first monkeypox case has been reported, a 37-year-old patient. Koca tweeted that the patient has immunodeficiency and is currently in isolation.
“Contact tracing work was conducted and no other cases were encountered,” the minister said, reiterating the fact that the disease spreads through “close physical contact.”
The World Health Organization (WHO) on Wednesday appealed for vigilance to ensure monkeypox does not spread among more vulnerable groups, such as children. Fighting the virus requires "intense" efforts, said the WHO, calling for broad data collection and sharing on how well vaccines work against the virus. Experts have detected a surge of monkeypox cases since early May outside of the West and Central African countries where the disease has long been endemic. Most of the new cases have been in western Europe.
WHO chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan called for "very careful studies of the vaccine in different population groups ... so that we get data that's broadly applicable, and also to ensure that children, pregnant women and the immunosuppressed are considered for inclusion in these trials."
As of June 22 this year, 3,413 laboratory-confirmed monkeypox cases and one death have been reported to the WHO, from 50 countries. The countries with three-figure case numbers are Britain with 793 cases, Germany with 521, Spain has 520, Portugal with 317, France has 277, Canada has 210, the Netherlands has 167 and the United States with 142. The vast majority of cases so far have been observed in men who have sex with men, at a young age, chiefly in urban areas, in "clustered social and sexual networks," according to the WHO.
Last week. the U.N. health agency convened an emergency committee of experts to decide if monkeypox constitutes a so-called Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC), the highest alarm that the WHO can sound. But a majority found the situation had not yet crossed that threshold. Nonetheless, "they acknowledged the emergency nature of the event and that controlling the further spread requires intense response efforts," Tedros said.
