The Nigeria Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said the country saw its first death this year from monkeypox in a patient with underlying medical conditions.

The agency announced on Sunday that it had confirmed 21 of 66 suspected cases of the disease, which is typically endemic in Nigeria and other parts of West and Central Africa, in 2022.

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“The death was reported in a 40-year-old patient who had underlying co-morbidity and was on immunosuppressive medications,” the Nigeria CDC added.

Nigeria has not had a monkeypox outbreak since September 2017, but sporadic cases of the disease are still being reported. Since then, at least 247 cases have been confirmed in 22 of the country's 36 states, with a 3.6% fatality rate, it stressed.

A surge in monkeypox cases reported in Europe and the US has alarmed those countries, many of which have not seen a single case of the disease in years. According to the World Health Organization, nearly 200 cases of the disease have been reported in more than 20 countries that are not typically known to have outbreaks.

It is worth mentioning that monkeypox has never caused widespread outbreaks outside of Africa, where it is endemic.