The Czech Republic, Austria and Slovenia have each recorded their first case of monkeypox, AFP learned on Tuesday from the health authorities of these countries.
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In the Czech Republic, the disease was detected in a man at the University Military Hospital in Prague, said the director of the Czech Society for Infectious Diseases, Pavel Dlouhy.
“It was only a matter of time, we had been expecting it for days,” he told AFP.
The Czech National Institute of Public Health said in a statement that the man had shown symptoms of the disease after returning from a music festival in Antwerp (northern Belgium) in early May.
In Austria, a man hospitalized in Vienna on Sunday with symptoms of monkeypox, including fever, has contracted the disease, health authorities in the capital said.
And in Slovenia, a man who developed symptoms after returning from Spain’s Canary Islands contracted monkeypox, according to local health authorities.
In recent days, the presence of this rare virus, endemic in certain regions of Africa, has been reported in several European countries, including Great Britain, France or Spain, as well as in the United States.
Medical authorities, including the World Health Organization (WHO), believe that the risk of this disease spreading widely is reduced.
