Japan’s Director-General of the Department of Tuberculosis Infectious Diseases of the Ministry of Health Masanori Imagawa and other officials attend a news conference on the first confirmed monkeypox infection in Japan, July 25, 2022 in Tokyo, Japan. Kyodo via Portal
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TOKYO, July 25 (Portal) – Japan has detected its first case of the monkeypox virus in Tokyo, the capital’s governor said on Monday.
The infected person is a man in his 30s who returned from Europe and is currently in a hospital, Yuriko Koike told reporters.
“He has a rash, fever, headache and fatigue. But at the moment he is in stable condition,” a health ministry official said in a separate news conference.
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The patient, a Tokyo resident, went to Europe late last month and had contact with a person who was later confirmed to be monkeypox-positive before returning to Japan in mid-July, the official said.
The official did not elaborate on the nature of the contact and declined to reveal the Tokyo resident’s nationality.
The World Health Organization said Saturday the rapidly spreading monkeypox outbreak posed a global public health emergency.
So far this year there have been more than 16,000 cases of monkeypox in more than 75 countries and five deaths in Africa.
The virus spreads through close contact and tends to cause flu-like symptoms and pus-filled skin lesions.
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Reporting by Sakura Murakami, Sam Nussey and Kiyoshi Takenaka; Edited by Toby Chopra, Mark Porter and Mark Heinrich
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