Israel registered this Saturday the first case of monkey pox after several European countries and the United States also detected cases of this endemic disease in Central and West Africa.
He is a 30-year-old man, who recently returned from Western Europe, a spokesman for Tel Aviv’s Ichilov hospital told AFP.
On Friday, the Ministry of Health reported that the man, whose symptoms are mild, had been in contact with a sick person abroad.
Several Western countries, including France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the United States, Sweden or Spain, have registered cases of this disease.
Monkeypox, or “orthopoxvirus simia” is a rare disease whose pathogen can be transmitted from animal to man and vice versa.
Its symptoms resemble, to a lesser degree, those observed in the past in subjects with smallpox: fever, headache, muscle and back pain during the first five days.
Rashes (on the face, palms of the hands, soles of the feet), lesions, pustules, and finally scabs then appear.
There are no specific treatments or vaccines against monkeypox, but outbreaks can be contained, explains the World Health Organization (WHO). Generally, the disease resolves spontaneously and the symptoms last between 14 and 21 days.
Person-to-person transmission occurs through close contact with infected respiratory secretions, skin lesions of an infected person, or objects recently contaminated with biological fluids or materials from a patient’s lesions.
Most of the cases recorded in recent days have been in men who have sex with men, the WHO said on Friday.