From BZ/dpa
Now the World Health Organization (WHO) is sounding the alarm about monkeypox outbreaks in more than 60 countries!
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus announced at a press conference on Saturday that the organization had declared the virus outbreak an “emergency of international concern”. This is the highest alert level.
However: This has no practical consequences. The classification is intended to encourage the governments of member countries to take measures to contain the outbreak. They are intended to sensitize doctors and clinics, take protective measures in suspected cases and educate the population on how to protect themselves from infection.
Tedros cited the number of more than 16,000 confirmed cases in more than 60 countries, many of which previously had virtually no monkeypox cases. There were over 240 cases in six African countries where the virus has previously infected humans. In Germany, the Robert Koch Institute reported almost 2,300 cases on Friday.
A committee of independent experts had previously failed to agree on a joint recommendation on whether to declare an emergency. The English abbreviation for an emergency is PHEIC. This stands for “Public Health Emergency of International Concern”.
The WHO also declared the outbreak of the Sars-CoV-2 coronavirus as such an emergency on January 30, 2020. But that doesn’t mean that people now have to prepare for the same measures for monkeypox as they did for the corona pandemic.
While the coronavirus spreads through aerosols containing viral particles that infected people expel when they breathe, speak or cough, according to current knowledge, monkeypox infections usually occur through close physical contact.
Monkeypox “clearly underestimated”
According to the Freiburg virologist Hartmut Hengel, the spread of monkeypox is “significantly underestimated at the moment”. They have at least the potential “to give us headaches in the future,” said the medical director of the Institute for Virology at the Freiburg University Hospital of the “Badische Zeitung”.
So far, only several thousand cases of monkeypox have been reported worldwide. “But it is wrong to deduce from this that what is happening is harmless – because you have to look to the future.” The virus is spread in 70 countries. “It has assumed forms of permanent circulation in some countries, including in Europe,” says Hengel.