Jalisco investigates its first death associated with monkeypox with the case of a male resident of Puerto Vallarta.
The Secretary of Health, Fernando Petersen, anticipated that it is a person over 40 years of age, who suffered from comorbidities such as HIV.
“The report has already been sent and was requested by the General Directorate of Epidemiology (DGE), so it will be analyzed in Mexico City. He was a person who had other comorbidities and it is thought that he was a patient who could have died with (monkeypox), but not from, so they asked us to send all the data,” he said.
The death was registered at the end of October in Puerto Vallarta, and at the beginning of November, the municipal Civil Registry confirmed in the death certificate that he had monkeypox, and the disease was established as the cause of death, although the laboratory official has neither confirmed nor denied the version established in the document.
Last week, state health authorities denied the death and reported that monkeypox was ruled out, however this week it was learned that no determination had been made and the test results from DGE had not been returned to the state. Jalisco has maintained a lack of transparency on monkeypox cases in Puerto Vallarta, the tourism jewel of the state.
The Secretary of Health requested the Federal Government to be provided with the smallpox vaccine, but there is still no response from the Federal Commission for the Protection against Sanitary Risks (Cofepris) on its endorsement of the vaccination, which still isn’t available in Mexico, promoting prevention measures is the only tool available in the health system.
In the last week, the agency delivered 7,000 brochures with preventive information and guidance in 113 strategic points in the metropolitan areas of Guadalajara and Puerto Vallarta; They were deployed in massive events, at the Miguel Hidalgo International Airport and other meeting places and tourist spaces where there is a concentration of people from the LGBT community, a social group that concentrates monkeypox infections in the country.
Jalisco registers to date 350 cases of monkeypox, five were confirmed in the last week, below the 20 weekly average.
