BANGKOK (REUTERS, AFP) - Thailand's health ministry on Thursday (July 21) confirmed the country's first monkeypox infection in a 27-year-old Nigerian national in the southern island of Phuket.

The man, who had a history of travelling from Nigeria, said he had been ill for about a week, according to senior health official Opas Karnkawinpong.

A surge in monkeypox infections has been reported since early May outside the West and Central African countries where the disease has long been endemic.

The World Health Organisation's (WHO) expert monkeypox committee are meeting on Thursday to decide whether to deploy the UN health agency's rarely used top alert for the worsening virus outbreak.

WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said more than 14,000 cases from 71 member states across all six WHO regions have been reported to the agency this year.

Ninety-eight per cent of reported cases “are among men who have sex with men (MSM) – and primarily those who have multiple recent anonymous or new partners”, Dr Rosamund Lewis, the WHO’s technical lead for monkeypox, told a press conference on Wednesday.

They are typically of young age and chiefly in urban areas, according to the WHO.

If the WHO expert committee advises Dr Tedros that the outbreak constitutes a so-called Public Health Emergency of International Concern, or PHEIC, it will propose temporary recommendations on how to better prevent and reduce the spread of the disease and manage the global public health response.

But there is no timetable for when the outcome will be made public.