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.
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