The Newz radar
A day after the World Health Organization (WHO) declared monkeypox a global health emergency, India reported its fourth case of the disease with links to Himachal Pradesh on July 24.
The virus has been confirmed in a Delhi tourist who recently visited Manali and attended a bachelorette party at a resort in the tourist hotspot.
The patient, who lives in West Delhi, is said to have been admitted to Maulana Azad Medical College in New Delhi for the past three days. He was hospitalized after his samples were found positive for the virus. His samples were sent to the National Institute of Virology (NIV) in Pune on Saturday for further testing. It is not yet clear where he caught the virus from. The 34-year-old had no history of foreign travel.
The development has set off alarm bells in the mountain state of Himachal Pradesh. State health authorities are said to be working at loggerheads to determine which places the Delhi tourist is visiting and with whom he has come into contact.
With more than 16,000 reported cases and five deaths from 75 countries, the WHO on Saturday declared monkeypox a global health emergency and issued guidelines to contain its outbreak.
WHO Director General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said a meeting of the International Health Regulations Emergency Committee was convened to assess whether the monkeypox outbreak in several countries constituted a public health emergency of international concern, which decided to designate it as a global health emergency. The outbreak has spread rapidly around the world through new transmission routes, leading to the issuance of recommendations for four groups of countries, he added.
