The World Health Organization (WHO) warned on Friday that the nearly 200 cases of monkeypox detected in recent weeks in countries where the virus does not usually circulate, could be only “the tip of the iceberg”. .
“We don’t know if we’re just seeing the tip of the iceberg,” said Sylvie Briand, director of the WHO’s global infectious risk preparedness department, during a presentation to the organization’s member states on the “unusual” spread of the virus, on the occasion of the World Health Assembly, in Geneva (Switzerland).
Experts are trying to determine what caused this “unusual situation”, and preliminary results show no variation or mutation in the monkeypox virus, Briand said.
“We have a window of opportunity to stop the transmission now,” she said. “If we put the right measures in place now, we can probably contain this quickly. »
More than 200 cases
The UK reported a first case on May 7. Since then, some 200 cases have been detected in countries far removed from those where the virus is endemic.
According to the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), precisely 219 cases – but no deaths – had been reported on Wednesday.
Endemic to eleven countries in Central and West Africa, monkeypox has suddenly been detected in more than twenty other countries around the world, including the United States, Canada, Australia, United Arab Emirates and a dozen European countries.
The Spanish Ministry of Health listed 98 confirmed cases on Friday, the United Kingdom 90, and Portugal 74. In the latter country, all the cases are men, most under the age of 40.
In Quebec, 25 cases have been confirmed, including one child.
‘Not a disease the general public should be worried about’
“We are currently at the very, very beginning of this event,” explained Ms. Briand. “We know we will have more cases in the days to come,” but “this is not a disease that the general public should be worried about. It’s not COVID or other fast-spreading diseases.”
Monkeypox belongs to the same family as smallpox, which killed millions of people around the world every year until it was eradicated in 1980.
But monkeypox is much less serious, with a mortality rate of 3 to 6%. Most patients recover after three to four weeks.
The initial symptoms are high fever, swollen glands and skin rashes. But the virus can also manifest in a less typical way, warned the Dr Sébastien Poulin, microbiologist-infectiologist at the CIUSSS des Laurentides, in an interview Thursday with The duty.
Effective smallpox vaccines
Many cases involve homosexuals, but experts point out that there is no evidence that the disease was sexually transmitted, rather it was transmitted by close contact with an infected person with lesions on the skin.
There isn’t really a cure, but antivirals have been developed against smallpox, one of which was recently approved by the European Medicines Agency (EMA), according to Briand.
Smallpox vaccines are found to be 85% effective against monkeypox. But most people under 45 have not been vaccinated against smallpox, and vaccine stocks are now very low.