The rapidly spreading Monkeypox Outbreak can be stopped, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Tuesday, “with the right strategies in the right groups”.
But “time is going by and we all need to pull together to make that happen”, warned Dr Rosamund Lewis, WHO Technical Lead on Monkeypox, who was speaking the regular press briefing Geneva.
On Saturday, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declared the spread of the virus to be a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC), the organization’s highest level of alert. “Through this, we hope to enhance coordination, cooperation of countries and all stakeholders, as well as global solidarity,” Dr Lewis said.
WHO assessed the risk posed to public health by Monkeypox in the European region as high, but at the global level as moderate.
With “other regions not at the moment as severely affected”, declaring a PHEIC was necessary “to ensure the outbreak was stopped as soon as possible”.
This year, there have been more than 16,000 confirmed cases of monkeypox in more than 75 countries. Dr Lewis said the real number was probably higher.
She pointed out that in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, several thousand cases were suspected, but testing facilities are limited. “The global dashboard did not include suspected cases,” she said.
Some 81 children under the age of 17 were reported as having been infected globally, she added, with the majority of cases being among young men, with the median age being 37.