Health
Monkeypox Virus Outbreaks Are Containable: WHO Says
(CTN News) – World Health Organization (WHO) has stated that monkeypox can be contained in countries outside of Africa where the virus is not normally detected.
The virus, which causes a rash and a fever, has been confirmed in more than 100 cases in Europe, the Americas, and Australia.
The number is expected to rise even further, but experts say that the overall risk to the general population is very low.
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Most of the cases of the virus occur in remote regions of Central and West Africa. The WHO’s emerging disease lead, Maria Van Kerkhove, indicated at a news conference on Monday that this was a containable situation.
As she points out, “we want to stop the human-to-human transmission of the disease, and we can do this in non-endemic countries,” she added, referring to recent cases in Europe and North America.
The virus has now been detected in 16 countries outside Africa.
Even though this is the largest outbreak of monkeypox outside of Africa in 50 years, monkeypox does not spread easily among people, and experts say the threat is not comparable to the Coronavirus pandemic.
According to Ms Van Kerkhove, the transmission of the disease is mostly through skin-to-skin contact, with most of the people who have been identified suffering from a mild condition.
After earlier speculation regarding the origin of the current outbreak, a WHO official said there was no evidence the monkeypox virus had mutated.
According to Rosamund Lewis, WHO’s smallpox secretariat director, viruses in this group tend not to mutate and to be fairly stable.
Symptoms of Monkeypox
Fever, headache, muscle aches, backaches, swollen lymph nodes, chills, and tiredness are among the initial symptoms, according to UKHSA. The rash may appear later, usually starting on the face and spreading to other parts of the body. The rash typically progresses through many stages before forming a scab, which eventually peels off.
