By Blake Wolf, OAN Staff
Thursday, August 15, 2024 4:18 PM
Swedish health authorities have announced the first confirmed cases of a powerful new strain of monkeypox (mpox) in the country, the first official case outside Africa.
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A new Mpox strain, known as “clade 1b,” has spread to several African countries, causing 14,000 cases and more than 500 deaths on the continent this year, according to the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
As the virus continues to mutate and spread, the World Health Organization (WHO) has declared the disease a “global public health emergency.”
The Swedish person reportedly contracted the virus after visiting an area of Africa where the disease is widespread.
“This afternoon we also confirmed one case of the more severe type of MPOX, the so-called clade 1, in Sweden,” Minister of Health and Social Affairs Jakob Forsmed said.
“This is the first case of lineage 1 diagnosed outside the African continent. The infected person acquired the infection during their stay in an African area where there is a large MPOX lineage 1 outbreak,” said Oliva Vigtsell, director of the Swedish Public Health Agency.
Health experts are now concerned that the new variant could spread across Europe.
According to Lawrence Gostin, a public health expert and professor at Georgetown Law School, discovering cases on the European continent could facilitate “rapid international spread of MPOX. If a case is discovered in Sweden, it is likely that there will be dozens of undetected cases in Europe.”
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