Kinkini Gupta
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The WHO Reported 6000 Monkeypox Cases Worldwide
The monkeypox outbreak was first seen in the month of May. By July, the cases have spiked rapidly. The disease has now spread to 58 countries of the world. More than 6000 cases have been reported by The World Health Organization (WHO). In a meeting held by WHO on June 27, the committee had decided not to declare monkeypox as a global health emergency. Recently, however, talks are going on about how it should be declared a health emergency. The scale at which the virus has already spread is concerning and it is very much likely that there are a lot more cases that are not getting reported. Thus, the real number of global cases could be much higher than 6000 with more people likely to get infected. Testing monkeypox virus also remains a challenge.
The UN agency will reconvene a meeting of the committee that will advise on declaring the outbreak a global health emergency, the WHO's highest level of alert, in the week beginning July 18 or sooner, Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a virtual news conference from Geneva.
The Ministry of Health of Singapore reported their first case of monkeypox recently. Eighty per cent of monkeypox cases are from Europe and the number is still rising. Canada has recently reported 101 confirmed cases of monkeypox till July 4. The symptoms experienced by the patients are rash, oral and genital lesions, swollen lymph nodes, headache, fever, chills, myalgia and fatigue.
According to earlier reports, the virus was seen to affect a lot of men. Experts stated that the reason of transmission could be sexual contact between men from 21 to 40 years of age. But, recently, Dr Hans Henri P. Kluge, WHO regional director for Europe, said in a statement that the virus is not just confined to gays and bisexuals. It is also spreading among heterosexual contacts, household members, non-sexual contacts and children.