WHO Confirms 643 Monkeypox Cases in Non-Endemic Countries

On Thursday, the World Health Organization (WHO) confirmed the existence of 643 cases of monkeypox in non-endemic countries. This figure is five times higher than that reported a week ago.

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The countries with the highest number of cases are the United Kingdom (190), Spain (142), Portugal (119), Germany (44), Canada (26), USA (18), France (17), Italy (14) and Belgium (10)

Some 2,000 experts attending a WHO meeting said this outbreak is unusual but "still controllable," stressing that the priority must be to combat the disease in its endemic foci in central and western Africa, where 66 people have died from it so far this year.

In the nine African countries where the disease is endemic, 1,405 infections have been reported. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for example, 1,264 cases and 58 of the deaths were detected, although most of these cases were never laboratory confirmed.

The WHO Health Emergencies Assistant Director Ibrahima Soce Fall stressed that the medical community must focus on continuing to detect cases, analyze possible transmission chains, and protect health workers. For this, vaccines against conventional smallpox could be used.

The conventional smallpox vaccine is 85 percent effective at preventing monkeypox, although that percentage may have dropped due to mutations in the virus. However, experts believe that mass vaccination in an affected country should not yet be considered.

London School of Tropical Medicine expert Paul Fine recalled that monkeypox cases increased after smallpox vaccination was discontinued in the late 1970s. In the last decade, for example, central Africa has reported some 18,000 cases of monkeypox, although most of them are suspected cases that have never been confirmed.