Monkeypox Scare: Int’l travellers with symptoms to be sent to LNJP Hospital, India working on indigenous testing kit

Days after Delhi reported its first case of monkeypox, the authorities have decided to send international travellers arriving in Delhi with symptoms such as high fever and back pain to the LNJP Hospital from the airport.

India has so far reported four confirmed cases of monkeypox with the latest one reported in Delhi – a 34-year-old man with no international travel history. He is currently in LNJP Hospital and will take at least a week to fully recover.

Here are the top updates on the disease:

The Delhi government has asked district authorities and officials concerned to adhere to the Centre’s guidelines on management of the infection, which also state that referral arrangements from airport/port to identified link hospital need to be established or strengthened.

News agency PTI quoted sources saying that that those travellers having symptoms like high fever, back pain and joint pain at the IGI Airport will be sent to the isolation ward at LNJP Hospital, which has a special 20-member team to deal with such patients.

With four confirmed cases, India is now developing its indigenous testing kit for monkeypox. The makers of the TrueNat real-time polymerase chain reaction, the world’s only point-of-care platform used by the World Health Organization (WHO) to detect tuberculosis, is developing the test kit for monkeypox, a report in Business Standard quoted government sources as saying.

The global count of monkeypox cases has neared 15,000-mark with six countries reporting their first cases last week. So far, more than 80 countries have already reported confirmed cases of the disease.

French Health Minister Francois Braun said on Monday that about 1700 people had been infected with monkey pox in France recently. “Today, about 1700 people have been contaminated with monkey pox in France. The profile (of the patients) is that they are mainly men who have had sexual relations with other men, but one can also be infected by contact with a patient’s blisters,” Braun said in an interview with BFM TV.