Sweden has reported the first confirmed case outside Africa of the more deadly mpox variant that sparked the World Health Organization to declare a global public health emergency a day earlier.
The person was infected during a stay in a part of Africa affected by the mpox outbreak, a statement from the Public Health Agency of Sweden said today.
“This case does not warrant any further infection control measures per se, but we take the outbreak of mpox clade I very seriously. We are monitoring it closely and continuously assessing whether new measures are needed,” Magnus Gisslén, Sweden’s state epidemiologist said.
The European Centres for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) will issue a new risk assessment on mpox soon, the public health agency said. In the meantime, we could see more “isolated import cases,” it added.
Clade I of mpox is associated with more severe illness and higher fatality rates than clade II, which was widespread during the 2022 outbreak that affected Europe and North America. Clade I also appears to affect children more.
Paul Hunter, a professor in medicine at the University of East Anglia, told Times Radio today that clade I was “almost certainly” in the U.K. already.
Clade I is spreading rapidly in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and neighboring countries — prompting the WHO to declare a public health emergency of international concern on Wednesday.
According to WHO, the first known case of sexually transmitted mpox clade I in the DRC was a resident of Belgium who was likely exposed to the virus there. Researchers later found no evidence that clade I was circulating in Belgium, however.