A top Chinese health official warned people against having skin-to-skin contact with foreigners to avoid contracting monkeypox, spurring a backlash among the country’s dwindling expatriate community.
China reported its first case of the infectious disease on Friday in Chongqing, a municipality in southwestern part of the country. The patient has been isolated and the risk of an outbreak is low, the local health commission said in a statement on its website.
Despite the reassurance, an official at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention suggested extreme steps to dodge the virus that has caused an onslaught of infections worldwide since an outbreak was reported in Europe last May. “To prevent possible monkeypox infection and as part of our healthy lifestyle, it is recommended that one, you do not have direct skin-to-skin contact with foreigners,” Wu Zunyou, chief epidemiologist at the CCDC, said on his official Weibo page on Saturday