Tag: Declaring

  • WHO discusses declaring emergency on monkeypox | The Guardian Nigeria News

    WHO discusses declaring emergency on monkeypox | The Guardian Nigeria News

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    Monkeypox experts discussed Thursday whether the World Health Organization should classify the outbreak as a global health emergency — the highest alarm it can sound.

    A second meeting of the WHO’s emergency committee on the virus was held to examine the worsening situation, with nearly 15,400 cases reported from 71 countries, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

    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.

    On June 23, the WHO convened an emergency committee of experts to decide if monkeypox constitutes a so-called Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) — the UN health agency’s highest alert level.

    But a majority advised the WHO’s chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus that the situation, at that point, had not met the threshold.

    The second meeting was called with case numbers rising further.

    “I need your advice in assessing the immediate and mid-term public health implications,” Tedros told the start of the meeting, which lasted more than six hours.

    If the committee advises Tedros that the outbreak constitutes a 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 committee will reach their conclusions from the meeting or make the outcome public.

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

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

    Tedros said Thursday that this posed a challenge, as in some countries, “the communities affected face life-threatening discrimination”.

    “There is a very real concern that men who have sex with men could be stigmatised or blamed for the outbreak, making the outbreak much harder to track, and to stop,” he told the meeting.

    Tedros said the first committee gathering helped delineate the dynamics of the outbreak, but he remained concerned about the number of cases.

    Despite an apparent declining trend in some countries, six nations reported their first cases last week.

    “As the outbreak develops, it’s important to assess the effectiveness of public health interventions in different settings, to better understand what works, and what doesn’t,” he said.

    Tedros also said information coming from endemic countries in Africa was “very scant”, making it hard to characterise the situation in the region and design interventions.

    A viral infection resembling smallpox and first detected in humans in 1970, monkeypox is less dangerous and contagious than smallpox, which was eradicated in 1980.

    – ‘Scary and exhausting‘ –
    The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control said that as of Monday, 7,896 confirmed cases had been reported from 27 countries in the European Economic Area.

    The worst affected were Spain (2,835), Germany (1,924), France (912), the Netherlands (656) and Portugal (515).

    “Particular sexual practices are very likely to have facilitated and could further facilitate the transmission of monkeypox among MSM groups,” it said.

    Danish company Bavarian Nordic is the lone laboratory manufacturing a licensed vaccine against monkeypox and jabs are currently in scarce supply.

    Loyce Pace, the assistant secretary for global affairs at the US Department of Health and Human Services, said it was “very hard” for the world to handle monkeypox on top of Covid-19 and other health crises.

    “I know it can be scary… and, frankly, exhausting,” she told reporters at the US mission in Geneva.

    However, “we know a lot more about this disease, we’ve been able to stop outbreaks previously and we, importantly, have medical counter-measures and other tools available”.



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  • WHO again considers declaring monkeypox a global emergency

    WHO again considers declaring monkeypox a global emergency

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    LONDON: As the World Health Organization’s emergency committee convenes Thursday to consider for the second time within weeks whether to declare monkeypox a global crisis, some scientists say the striking differences between the outbreaks in Africa and in developed countries will complicate any coordinated response.
    African officials say they are already treating the continent’s epidemic as an emergency. But experts elsewhere say the mild version of monkeypox in Europe, North America and beyond makes an emergency declaration unnecessary even if the virus cannot be stopped. British officials recently downgraded their assessment of the disease, given its lack of severity.
    Monkeypox has been entrenched for decades in parts of central and western Africa, where diseased wild animals occasionally infect people in rural areas in relatively contained epidemics. The disease in Europe, North America and beyond has circulated since at least May among gay and bisexual men. The epidemic in rich countries was likely triggered by sex at two raves in Spain and Belgium.
    Some experts worry these and other differences could possibly deepen existing medical inequities between poor and wealthy nations.
    There are now nearly 15,000 monkeypox cases worldwide. While the United States, Britain, Canada and other countries have bought millions of vaccines, none have gone to Africa, where a more severe version of monkeypox has already killed more than 70 people. Rich countries have not yet reported any monkeypox deaths.
    “What’s happening in Africa is almost entirely separate from the outbreak in Europe and North America,” said Dr. Paul Hunter, a professor of medicine at Britain’s University of East Anglia who previously advised WHO on infectious diseases.
    The U.N. health agency said this week that outside of Africa, 99% of all reported monkeypox cases are in men and of those, 98% are in men who have sex with other men. Still, the disease can infect anyone in close, physical contact with a monkeypox patient, regardless of their sexual orientation.
    “In these very active gay sexual networks, you have men who really, really don’t want people to know what they’re doing and may not themselves always know who they are having sex with,” Hunter said.
    Some of those men may be married to women or have families unaware of their sexual activity, which “makes contact tracing extremely difficult and even things like asking people to come forward for testing,” Hunter said, explaining why vaccination may be the most effective way to shut down the outbreak.
    That’s probably not the case in Africa, where limited data suggests monkeypox is mainly jumping into people from infected animals. Although African experts acknowledge they could be missing cases among gay and bisexual men, given limited surveillance and stigmatization against LGBTQ people, authorities have relied on standard measures like isolation and education to control the disease.
    Dr. Placide Mbala, a virologist who directs the global health department at Congo’s Institute of National Biomedical Research, said there are also noticeable differences between patients in Africa and the West.
    “We see here (in Congo) very quickly, after three to four days, visible lesions in people exposed to monkeypox,” Mbala said, adding that someone with so many visible lesions is unlikely to go out in public, thus preventing further transmission.
    But in countries including Britain and the U.S., doctors have observed some infected people with only one or two lesions, often in their genitals.
    “You wouldn’t notice that if you’re just with that person in a taxi or a bar,” Mbala said. “So in the West, people without these visible lesions may be silently spreading the disease.”
    He said different approaches in different countries will likely be needed to stop the global outbreak, making it challenging to adopt a single response strategy worldwide, like those used to stop Ebola and COVID-19.
    Dr. Dimie Ogoina, a professor of medicine at Nigeria’s Niger Delta University, said he feared the world’s limited vaccine supplies would result in a repeat of the problems that arose in the coronavirus pandemic, when poorer countries were left empty-handed after rich countries hoarded most of the doses.
    “It does not make sense to just control the outbreak in Europe and America because you will then still have the (animal) source of the outbreak in Africa,” said Ogoina, who sits on WHO’s monkeypox emergency committee.
    This week. U.S. officials said more than 100,000 monkeypox vaccine doses were being sent to states in the next few days, with several million more on order for the months ahead. The U.S. has reported more than 2,000 cases so far, with hundreds more added every day.
    Some U.S. public health experts have begun to wonder if the outbreak is becoming widespread enough that monkeypox will become a new sexually transmitted disease.
    Declaring monkeypox to be a global emergency could also inadvertently worsen the rush for vaccines, despite the mildness of the disease being seen in most countries.
    Dr. Hugh Adler, who treats monkeypox patients in Britain, said there aren’t many serious cases or infections beyond gay and bisexual men. Still, he said it was frustrating that more vaccines weren’t available, since the outbreak was doubling about every two weeks in the U.K..
    “If reclassifying monkeypox as a global emergency will make (vaccines available), then maybe that’s what needs to be done,” he said. “But in an ideal world, we should be able to make the necessary interventions without the emergency declaration.”



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