After India reported the first case of Monkeypox in Kerala, Tamil Nadu health minister Ma Subramanian said on Saturday that his government is monitoring the state’s borders with Kerala at 13 checkpoints.
Subramanian, along with Tamil Nadu health secretary Senthil Kumar inspected the screening of international passengers at Chennai in wake of the Monkeypox crisis.
“We have started to monitor the state’s borders with Kerala at 13 checkpoints. We’re already conducting mass fever screening camps and we have also attached monkeypox screening to it. If anyone is found with symptoms they will be monitored,” news agency ANI quoted the Tamil Nadu health minister.
The state health minister pointed out that no cases of monkeypox have been found in Tamil Nadu.
“Two per cent of the passengers are checked randomly at the Chennai airport. 30-40 international flights with 5,000-9,000 passengers come daily. In the last 14 days, we received 531 flights with 1,00,153 passengers. Of these, 39 passengers had Covid and they’re home quarantined,” he further told reporters,” Subramanian further told reporters.
The monkeypox patient from Kerala is a 35-year-old man who returned to the Kollam district of the southern state from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and was hospitalised after showing symptoms, later being found infected with the virus.
The Union government rushed an expert team to Kerala after the case was detected.
The Kerala government, meanwhile, stepped up vigil to prevent the spread of monkeypox and issued special alerts to five districts- Thiruvananthapuram, Kollam, Pathanamthitta, Alappuzha and Kottayam.
State health minister Veenga George said on Friday that people from the aforementioned districts were co-passengers of the infected person in the Sharjah-Thiruvananthapuram Indigo flight that landed here on July 12. She added that 11 people who were in the seats next to him are on the high risk contact list.
