The organization declares the disease an international health emergency after registering 17,000 cases worldwide, 3,000 of them in Spain, the country with the most patients
The World Health Organization (WHO) declared this Saturday that monkeypox is a public health emergency of “concerning nature” on an international scale, the highest level of alert that the entity can establish on a disease. Until now, only covid-19 had reached this risk designation. With the measure, the WHO is empowered to make recommendations that, in theory, are mandatory for the countries that make up the organization.
“We have an outbreak that has spread rapidly around the world, through new modes of transmission, about which we know very little and that meets the criteria of the International Health Regulations,” the WHO director-general said on Saturday. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who, ultimately, was in charge of making this decision before the division of experts who had to agree on an alarm level.
Spain is the country in the world with the most detected cases of monkeypox, 3,125, according to the latest report from the Ministry of Health, made public last Tuesday. Madrid, with 1,378, is the most affected community although cases have been reported in all of them, after La Rioja did this Friday, the only one in which until now there had been none computed. After Spain, the most affected countries are the United States, also around 3,000, and the United Kingdom and Germany, with around 2,000 infected.
Worldwide, the WHO has detected 17,000 cases, which have caused five deaths, in 74 countries, although most of the patients, three out of four, are in Europe. In fact, the body assesses the risk of monkeypox as “moderate” globally, but “high” on the European continent.
In any case, Ghebreyesus has appealed for calm. “With the tools we have now, we can stop transmission and control this outbreak,” assured the highest health official, who has asked countries to follow established protocols for infectious diseases.
In addition, the director general of the WHO has insisted that “for the moment, it is an outbreak that is concentrated among men who have homosexual relationships, especially with multiple partners”, although he has demanded that no group be discriminated against because ” stigma is as dangerous as any virus.”
Monkeypox is a viral zoonotic disease whose first human cases were identified in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1970. It is endemic in some countries in West and Central Africa, but as of 2022, all infections identified outside of those areas were imported (people who lived in those areas and moved to other places) or were linked to animals brought from those endemic places.
But in May 2022, the UK reported cases with no history of travel to endemic areas or contact with previously reported cases. Since then, countries around the world, but especially in Europe and America, have confirmed infections. This is the first time that transmission chains have been reported in Europe and on other continents.
According to data from the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), the vast majority of those infected are men (99.5%) and are between 31 and 40 years old (42%). The most common symptoms among patients are skin rash (94.5%) and fever, fatigue, muscle pain, vomiting, diarrhoea, chills, sore throat or headache (65%). In Europe, 8% of those infected have required hospital admission.
There is no specific vaccine against monkeypox, but the human smallpox vaccine is 85% effective against this disease. So far, Spain has received 5,300 doses of the monkeypox vaccine, acquired through a centralized purchase coordinated by the European Union. The protocol of the Ministry of Health recommends preventive vaccination for people who have risky sexual relationships and for health workers exposed to the disease and advises ‘post-exposure’ prophylaxis to those who have been in close contact with the infections, especially if they are people at risk .
#activates #highest #alert #level #monkeypox