A woman walks past a monkeypox vaccination clinic in New York. BRENDAN MCDERMID (REUTERS)
The United States believes it has its first fatality from monkeypox.
This was confirmed on Monday by the Los Angeles health authorities, who assured that it is a person who lived in this California county.
Doctors have assured that the patient had been admitted to a hospital and was "severely immunocompromised".
At the moment, they have not given details about his age or gender.
A Texas man infected with monkeypox died in late August, in what is also suspected to be the first fatality from the disease.
Federal authorities have not determined, in either case, whether the virus was the determining factor that caused death.
Local health authorities reported this case for the first time on Thursday.
The announcement was followed by an investigation that took a few days.
This Monday, they issued a statement in which the cause of death was reported after having subjected the body to an autopsy.
“Severely immunosuppressed persons who suspect they may be infected with monkeypox should seek medical treatment as early as possible and be monitored during their illness,” said the Los Angeles County Public Health agency.
The finding of the Los Angeles doctors, however, has not been confirmed by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, which monitors smallpox cases in the country.
In the world there are eight deaths caused by this viral disease, which has a low transmission rate and a lethality that affects only between 3% and 6% of those who contract it.
Most of the cases are manifesting in a mild way, but according to specialists, four out of ten infected patients need treatment.
Despite not being highly lethal, it is very annoying because it causes blisters in the genital area and the anus, inflames that same area and can cause tonsillitis.
The big problem that has been recorded in most countries is that there is a shortage of vaccines, which has hampered the fight against monkeypox.
The United States declared a health emergency in August when more than 7,000 infected people were registered.
Days before, the governor of California, Gavin Newsom, had made a similar decision due to the increase in the rate of contagion in the most populated region of the country.
The declaration of local emergency allowed the holders of the local health systems to have more agile doses of vaccines and administer them more quickly in community clinics throughout the entity.
The US is the country that has reported the most cases in the world, with 21,900.
San Francisco was the first focus of the epidemic in California, which has recorded 4,300 infected patients since July.
More than 700 were detected in the city by the bay, which began with one in three cases in the first weeks of August.
This prompted Mayor London Breed to ask state authorities for help to speed up the pace of vaccination.
As the weeks progressed, the Los Angeles metropolitan area, the most populous in the state, displaced San Francisco in the number of cases.
Los Angeles had 1,692 cases as of Tuesday.
The West Coast, because of its proximity to Asia, is often the gateway to the United States for many of the diseases detected in other parts of the world.
On January 20, 2020, the coronavirus was first found inside a patient in Washington State who had presented symptoms.
At the end of February, the death of a patient in the same region was announced.
This was thought to have been the first death from covid infection.
Months later, the health authorities corrected the information by reporting that, in reality, the first victim of the virus had been registered in the Californian county of Santa Clara in early February, three weeks before the death in Washington.