To prevent the virus from spreading rapidly from domestic animals to animals outside the home, in particular rodents, the WHO recalls that the “waste management is essential”.
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The evolution of monkeypox worries. The World Health Organization (WHO) on Wednesday (August 17) called on people infected with monkeypox to avoid exposing animals to the virus. A week earlier, on August 10, the first case of monkeypox transmission from humans to dogs was reported in the medical journal The Lancet. Two infected men transmitted the virus to their greyhound in Paris.
“We believe this is the first time a dog has been infected”, commented to journalists Rosamund Lewis, technical manager at the WHO for monkeypox. Experts, she recalled, were aware of the theoretical risk of this type of transmission. Public health agencies were asking infected people to “keep away from pets”.
The main concern is for animals living outside the home, when“a virus moves through a small mammalian population with a high density of animals”WHO emergency director Michael Ryan told reporters. “It is through the process of one animal infecting the next and the next and the next that you see a rapid evolution of the virus”he pointed out.
To reduce the risk of contamination from rodents (especially rats) and other animals outside the home, the “waste management is essential”alerted Rosamund Lewis. According to the latest WHO report, 31,665 cases of monkeypox, including 12 deaths, have been recorded worldwide.