Argentina to quarantine cargo ship after crew member shows symptoms of mpox

(CNN) — Health authorities in Argentina say they will inspect and quarantine a cargo ship in its waters after a crew member showed symptoms of mpox.

A spokesperson for the country’s health ministry told CNN the inspection would be carried out by the border health service, which has already contacted the crew.

According to the ship tracking service MarineTraffic, the vessel was anchored in a river off its destination in San Lorenzo as of 6:10 p.m. ET. Its previous stop was in Santos, Brazil.

Medical personnel will board it and inspect whether the crew member’s symptoms are indeed compatible with mpox. If they are, they will take samples for study. The ship will remain in the harbor and the entire crew will be quarantined until the results of the studies are available.

So far, the ministry has not said how many people are on board the Liberia-flagged ship, named Ina-Lotte.

On Friday, it called for strengthening border health control measures in Argentina, two days after the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a public health emergency of international concern due to an outbreak of mpox in parts of Africa.

Other Latin American countries, such as Colombia, El Salvador, Venezuela and Mexico have announced similar surveillance measures.

A deadlier strain of the virus, clade 1b – also written as clade Ib – is spreading quickly in the Democratic Republic of Congo and has reached at least four previously unaffected countries in Africa.

Mpox is characterized by two genetic clades, 1 and 2. A clade is a broad grouping of viruses that has evolved over decades and is a genetic and clinically distinct group. Clade 2 was responsible for the 2022 outbreak, but clade 1b causes more severe disease.

What is mpox?

The outbreak of mpox is not the next Covid-19, the WHO said Tuesday, calling for a coordinated response to the ongoing outbreak.

“Mpox is not the new COVID,” the WHO’s Europe director Hans Kluge said in a press briefing, speaking over video from Geneva.

Kluge said that, while more research is needed on the clade 1b strain, which is found to be the deadlier strain, the spread can be controlled.

“We know how to control mpox. And, in the European region, the steps needed to eliminate its transmission altogether,” Kluge said, stressing the need for a coordinated response.

That need “is now greatest in the African region,” he said. “We can, and must, tackle mpox together – across regions and continents.”

The WHO declared a global health emergency last week amid concerns over clade 1b’s spread in Africa. This strain had previously been contained to the DRC.

The strain has since been confirmed in Sweden, the first case outside of Africa, which was contracted on a visit to Africa.

For decades, the disease had largely been found in central and western Africa, but it also began spreading in Europe and North America in 2022. The WHO previously declared the spread of mpox a global health emergency in July 2022 and ended that declaration in May 2023.

This story has been updated with additional information.

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CNN’s Alex Stambaugh and Maya Davis contributed to this report.