The head of the world health organization has declared the fast-spreading monkeypox outbreak a global health emergency cases have been detected in more than 70 countries the health agency hopes the declaration will draw more attention and resources to fighting the disease here’s what the head of the who had to say so in short
We have a flare-up that has spread all over the planet quickly through new models of transmission about which we see nearly nothing and which meets the standards in the international health regulations for all of these reasons I have decided
Background in molecular biomedicine so first of all the significance of the world health organizations declaration tells us more about that well you know declaring a public health
The emergency of international concern is the loudest alarm bell the w jo can ring the hope of course is that this creates the awareness that this spurs countries into action, but whether that actually happens is another question remember the last time the who declared the phdic was in January 2020 for covet 19 and I didn’t get the sense at the time that really spurred a lot of countries interaction but that is the hope now the who’s head tedious uh made the decision without the full backing of the emergency committee what
Is behind that disagreement yes that is actually unprecedented so the the panic this tool was created in 2005 with the with the international health regulations and usually the director general has always followed their advice in this case the committee was split so a slight majority of members actually was against declaring a public health emergency of international concern and you know they’ve given different reasons for why that might be so you know one argument was that this is not spreading in the general population at the moment it’s concentrated in men who have sex with men it hasn’t caused a lot of deaths so far but but in the end there was a lot of pressure from epidemiologists and almost all the experts i talked to were you know convinced that this would help uh curb the outbreak and so i think there was a lot of pressure on him to to to go this way but it is unusual and and experts like the ones you note do seem to be taken by surprise by the pace of this virus the amount that it’s spreading how concerned should people be
Yes, I mean what is unusual about this outbreak is really that it is affecting one particular group at the moment when we have sex with men and that it is spreading at a pace that we haven’t really seen with monkeypox in the past, this is not a virus that actually transmits all that well, um so at the moment we think that the sexual networks that exist make it much easier for this virus to spread from person to person these are just much
More densely connected networks than are usually affected and but that also means that the risk is very different for different groups at the moment so at the moment at the moment the risk communication has to be that anybody who is a man having sex with men um you know needs to be particularly careful it’s at a much higher risk than the rest of the population but of course, over time this virus can spill over into other groups we don’t know whether it can find other densely connected networks that it can spread in
