What is monkeypox virus

The National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD), a division of the National Health Laboratory Service, confirms that a case of monkeypox has been ...

Isolation of confirmed cases allows for the prevention of transmission and interruption of the cycle of transmission. The risk to the general population is considered low, given the low transmissibility of the virus. The National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD), a division of the National Health Laboratory Service, confirms that a case of monkeypox has been identified in South Africa through laboratory testing at the NICD on Wednesday, June 22, 2022.

The Director-General of WHO is convening an Emergency Committee under Article 48 of the International Health Regulations in relation to the current outbreak ...

The World Health Organization convenes its emergency committee Thursday to consider if the spiraling outbreak of monkeypox warrants being declared a global ...

“There may be legitimate reasons why WHO only raised the alarm when monkeypox spread to rich countries, but to poor countries, that looks like a double standard,” Fidler said. “It is a bit curious that WHO only called their experts when the disease showed up in white countries,” he said. But few countries took notice until March, when the organization described it as a pandemic, weeks after many other authorities did so. It would also give monkeypox the same distinction as the COVID-19 pandemic and the ongoing effort to eradicate polio. Monkeypox has sickened people for decades in central and west Africa, where one version of the disease kills up to 10 percent of people infected. LONDON (AP) — The World Health Organization convenes its emergency committee Thursday to consider if the spiraling outbreak of monkeypox warrants being declared a global emergency.

He urged South Africans not to panic, noting that monkeypox was not an airborne disease like Covid-19. “It's not a very severe illness but also because it is ...

The cases to date mostly involve individuals that self-identify as men having sex with men. The risk to the general population is considered low, given the low transmissibility of the virus,” the NICD added. This is the first multi-country outbreak of monkeypox and is already the largest outbreak of monkeypox recorded.

African researchers have been warning about monkeypox outbreaks for years. As vaccines are deployed globally, they worry they will be left behind.

In recent weeks, the WHO has recognized the inequity in the global attention that monkeypox is receiving. At the same time, researchers have been warning that cases of monkeypox in sub-Saharan Africa have been rising for years. Smallpox was eradicated in 1980 and vaccination was halted, meaning that the percentage of the population vulnerable to it — and thus to monkeypox — has been growing (see ‘Monkeypox cases rising in Africa’). Acknowledging that many cases have so far occurred in men who have sex with men (MSM), authorities in several Canadian cities and in the United Kingdom have gone one step further and begun offering the vaccines to their MSM communities. Some health officials in sub-Saharan Africa worry that they will continue to be left behind, judging by their experience of vaccine inequity during the COVID-19 pandemic. “Without addressing the fundamental issues, you’ll end up using all your vaccines toward monkeypox,” he says, instead of dealing with the source of the problem — contact between wildlife and humans. Other researchers Nature spoke with also said the shots could help to curb monkeypox in Africa if they were given to people with compromised immune systems and those who frequently encounter wildlife. They point out that they have long been warning of the potential for the monkeypox virus, which has been behaving in new ways, to spread more widely. Meanwhile, some African nations have been dealing with monkeypox outbreaks ever since scientists identified the first human case in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in 1970. With the virus now proliferating in Western cities through what seems to be close contact with sexual partners, “the world is paying the price for not having responded adequately” in 2017, she says. In Central Africa, the strain of monkeypox virus that has infected people is more virulent, with a mortality rate of about 10%. The largest of these outbreaks was a short-lived one in the United States in 2003, which stemmed from imported animals and made more than 70 people ill.

(ST. JOSEPH, Mo.) The CDC says that a case of the Monkeypox virus has been confirmed in Kansas City, Missouri. Since the distance between St. Joe and Kansas ...