The Spanish Ministry of Health confirmed this Saturday the second death due to monkeypox in the country and there are already three victims outside of Africa, where the disease arose.
It’s about a 31 year old man who was admitted to the Intensive Care Unit of the Reina Sofía University Hospital, in the Spanish city of Córdoba.
According to health sources, the specialists took a series of samples during the autopsy that are being studied to determine if what caused his death was meningoencephalitis or another pathology.
His death is the third to be produced outside the African continent -where the first cases of the virus were detected- and the second within Spain, which already accounts for almost 4,300 cases of monkeypox, according to the latest data from the National Epidemiological Surveillance Network (RENAVE).
The first victim was released this Friday in the Valencian Community and was also a young man, according to the EFE news agency.
Like the recent case, the exact reasons for this death are still being investigated, although the indications point to encephalitis associated with the infection caused by the virus.
On the same day, the death of a patient infected with monkeypox in Brazil was reported, which was the first outside of Africa.
The deceased person has characteristics similar to the cases already mentioned: he was also young, a 41-year-old man, who was dealing with the disease in a hospital.
An electron microscope image of mature monkeypox virions. AP Photo
“The man who suffered from monkeypox and was under monitoring in hospital for other serious clinical conditions, died on Thursday,” the health secretary of the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais said in a statement.
The patient, who according to local media was fighting cancer and had serious immune problems, died at the Eduardo de Menezes Hospital in Belo Horizonte, the cital of Minas Gerais.
For its part, in Argentina there are already 19 cases, of which 17 are imported. The last confirmed infected was in Santa Fe last Thursday, when they reported the first contagion in the province of “a patient with a travel history who registers a contact with a positive case in another country.”
The WHO declared an international health emergency due to the outbreak
The decision was announced last Saturday at a press conference by the director general of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, two days after an emergency committee with experts in this disease met to analyze the possible declaration, which will force networks national health authorities to increase their preventive measures.
This committee had chosen not to declare the emergency at a first meeting held in June, when the cases were 3,000.
On this occasion, according to Tedros, there was also no complete consensus among the experts, but the director general decided to declare the emergency in view of the high and growing number of cases in various regions of the entire planet.
With information from agencies
