Porto Alegre Confirms First 2026 Mpox Case as WHO Flags Recombinant Strain

Overview

• Porto Alegre’s health surveillance confirmed an imported mpox infection in a city resident, with the patient treated after developing characteristic symptoms and no further details released.
• Brazil has logged 47 mpox cases in 2026, mostly mild to moderate with no deaths, concentrated in São Paulo (41) and Rio de Janeiro (3), plus single cases in Rondônia, Santa Catarina and the Federal District.
• Municipal guidance for Carnival advises checking skin for lesions, avoiding intimate or prolonged contact with people who have suspicious rashes, maintaining hand hygiene, not sharing personal items and considering masks in very dense crowds.
• The WHO has identified a recombinant mpox variant combining clades 1b and 2b in two travel-linked cases in the United Kingdom and India, with no severe illness reported and a weeks-long gap suggesting undetected transmission.
• WHO cautions that routine clade-differentiation tests may miss recombinants and recommends genomic sequencing for all early cases and representative sampling during community spread, while keeping its current risk assessment unchanged.