The first tourist to be officially diagnosed with monkeypox died days after arriving at a popular Caribbean resort. The Ministry of Health of Cuba reported on Monday, August 22, the first and so far only fatal case of a tourist from a new disease that is spreading around the world.
“This patient’s condition quickly deteriorated to critical, his sleep was unstable since August 18 and he died on the afternoon of the 21st,” the department said in a statement. The 50-year-old Italian arrived at the Caribbean resort on August 15 and was hospitalized three days later, the ministry said. “The autopsy conducted at the Institute of Forensic Medicine showed that the cause of death was sepsis due to bronchopneumonia caused by an unidentified microbe and multiple organ damage,” the report also explained. The ministry ruled out the presence of other pathologies of infectious origin in the patient after carrying out studies aimed at explaining its severity.
It is known that the traveler stayed in a rented house and managed to visit several places in the western provinces of the country. On Wednesday he felt general symptoms of malaise and on Thursday he went to the doctor because they did not go away. The man was urgently hospitalized after cardiac arrest. Doctors performed resuscitation and the tourist recovered. However, he still died later. According to the Cuban Ministry, people who were in close contact with the travelers have been placed in isolation, and no characteristic symptoms have been detected in them.
Reference: The virus is now found in several non-endemic countries. Fatal cases have been recorded in Spain, Brazil, India, and now in Cuba. In total, more than 41,000 cases of monkeypox infection have been identified, and a third of them are in the United States. Earlier, the World Health Organization (WHO) recognized the spread of an infectious disease as a public health emergency. In July, Turkish doctors declared that the super-popular foreign destination of Antalya is a dangerous zone from the point of view of the spread of monkeypox – read the details at this link.