South Africa Records First Mpox Death

Reuters (6/12, Anders) reports, “A 37-year-old man has become South Africa’s first recorded death from mpox after five laboratory-confirmed cases of the viral infection were recorded in the past month, the health minister” Joe Phaahla “said on Wednesday.” He “said all of South Africa’s mpox cases were in men aged between 30 and 39 years old without travel history to countries currently experiencing an outbreak, which suggests local transmission of the infectious disease.” Genomic “sequencing of three of the cases found the strain mpox clade IIb, which began to spread globally in 2022.”