Delhi gets 4th monkeypox case as woman tests positive for infection

The woman, a Nigerian national who lives in Delhi, has been admitted at Lok Nayak Hospital since Tuesday does not have a history of foreign travel, just like the previous three patients.

A 31-year-old woman in Delhi tested positive for monkeypox on Wednesday, becoming the fourth person in the city, and the first woman in the country, to be diagnosed with the viral infection, officials from the Union health ministry confirmed.

Delhi gets 4th monkeypox case as woman tests positive for infection. (Sunil Ghosh/Hindustan Times)

The woman, a Nigerian national who lives in Delhi, has been admitted at Lok Nayak Hospital since Tuesday does not have a history of foreign travel, just like the previous three patients. Two other monkeypox patients, also Nigerians, are being treated at the facility, which is Delhi’s nodal hospital for people diagnosed with the infection. The Capital’s first monkeypox patient, a 34-year-old resident of west Delhi, was discharged on Tuesday, 25 days after his first symptoms.

To be sure, senior hospital officials confirmed that the three Nigerian patients are not contacts of each other, do not know each other and “live in separate parts” of Delhi.

Dr Suresh Kumar, medical director of Lok Nayak Hospital that the woman was admitted to the hospital’s isolation facility with fever and eruptions on the skin. Her samples were sent to the National Institute of Virology (NIV) in Pune and the test report returned a positive result on Wednesday.

“Her condition is stable. We are monitoring the symptoms,” Dr Kumar said.

The union health ministry also confirmed the case to be the country’s ninth monkeypox infection. Till Wednesday evening, five monkeypox infections were reported from Kerala and four from Delhi.

Monkeypox, usually a self-limiting viral infection, manifests with fever, rashes and swollen lymph nodes and may lead to a range of medical complications. The symptoms are known to typically last between two and four weeks.

The infection, unlike Covid-19, is not easily airborne and spreads through close contact with bodily fluids or through contact with the clothes or bed linen of an infected person.

Health experts reiterated that in Delhi, unlike in Kerala, none of the monkeypox patients has a known history of foreign travel, which indicates that the administration may have missed “patient zero” in the initial period or that other cases have gone undetected.

“These patients could have acquired infection from clinically asymptomatic people, who have rashes so they were in an infectious state. It is also possible that some cases have gone undetected,” said Dr Ekta Gupta, professor of clinical virology at the Institute of Liver and Biliary Sciences (ILBS).

Experts also said there is also a possibility that at least some of these patients indirectly share contacts.

“Local transmission in Delhi implies that there is a possibility of more people being suspected positive, who have travelled from outside the country, carrying the virus. They remain undiagnosed because they are either not being tested for this virus or have not yet developed symptoms and so are not approaching clinicians. There is a high possibility that people who are testing positive share contacts. This will become clearer once we do a thorough contact tracing,” said Dr Vineeta Tandon, consultant (internal medicine), at PSRI Hospital, who specialises in infectious diseases and immunisation.