More cases of monkeypox are being identified across the United States, with health departments in Pennsylvania, Illinois and California alerting the public to positive tests.
Illinois announced its first probable case of the virus Thursday in a man who lives in Chicago but recently traveled to Europe, the Chicago Tribune reported. That person is isolating at home in good condition, and did not require hospitalization, according to the newspaper.
A Philadelphia resident became the first person in Pennsylvania to test positive Thursday, health officials told WCAU.
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“The threat to Philadelphians from monkeypox is extremely low,” Dana Perella, manager of the Philadelphia Health Department Acute Communicable Disease Program, told WPVI. “Monkeypox is much less contagious than COVID-19 and is containable particularly when prompt care is sought for symptoms.”
City officials told WPVI that they are working to determine how the patient may have been exposed the virus to anybody else since becoming sick.
In California, the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health announced its first presumptive case of monkeypox in a resident who had traveled recently and had a known close contact with a confirmed case of the disease, KTLA reported. The case is still awaiting final confirmation through testing by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health told KABC that the patient is symptomatic but not hospitalized, and is isolated away from others. Officials said they are conducting contact tracing to determine whether anybody else is at risk of getting sick.
>>Read: Government to release some vaccine doses as WHO says outbreak is ‘containable’
On Wednesday, the CDC confirmed 19 cases across 10 states, including Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Massachusetts, New York, Utah, Virginia and Washington.
Internationally, there have been more than 550 confirmed cases of monkeypox in 30 countries, the World Health Organization told CNN.
Monkeypox is a viral disease that was first discovered in 1958 in monkeys kept for research, according to the CDC. The first recorded human case of monkeypox was in 1970 in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The disease can be deadly in 10% of people who catch the virus.
