Sweden Announces First Case of More Contagious ‘Mpox’ Strain Found Outside of Africa

The Swedish government has announced the presence of the first confirmed case of a more severe “Mpox” strain diagnosed outside of Africa, the virus formerly known as Monkeypox before it was renamed.

The first case of Clade (‘branch‘) 1 Mpox, which is believed to be more deadly than the Clade 2 which broke out in 2022, has been announced in Sweden. A government press conference on Thursday afternoon revealed the case had caught the virus during a stay in an African country.

Swedish Minister of Social Affairs Jakob Forssmed said in Stockholm: “We have now received confirmation during the afternoon that we have a case of the more serious variant of the virus”, reports Dagens Nyheter. He was joined by Public Health Agency director Olivia Wigzel, who confirmed: “The case is the first caused by the virus variant that has been diagnosed outside the African continent”.

Wigzel assured that the state had sufficient precautions in place and that the wider public is not at risk. It was stated the patient has been issued with “rules of conduct” to reduce risk of further spread inside Sweden.

Mpox causes flu-like symptoms and skin lesions, and in some cases can be fatal. The now-spreading Clade 1 variant is more deadly, and the situation surrounding the disease led the World Health Organisation to declare a public health emergency on Wednesday.

The disease was until recently known as Monkeypox, but as reported in 2022 by the New York Times, it was rebranded after complaints that the name “played into racist stereotypes and fuelled stigmatisation”. This coy approach to the disease persists now, with Reuters’ report on the Sweden case this afternoon euphemistically describing the spread of what is now called Mpox as coming through “close contact”.

The World Health Organisation is more direct, noting in their datasheet that while sexual contact is not the only way to spread the disease, nevertheless most of the cases in the last outbreak were among men who have sex with men.