LONDON | The UK is registering new cases of monkeypox every day, an official with the UK Health Security Agency said on Sunday, a subject the government says it takes “very seriously”.
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“We are detecting more cases every day,” Susan Hopkins, the UK Health Security Agency’s (UKHSA) chief medical officer, told the BBC.
Last week, twenty patients had been identified and a new report will be published on Monday “with the figures for the weekend,” said Ms. Hopkins.
Several European countries have identified cases of monkeypox, which could accelerate in Europe, said Friday a regional official of the World Health Organization (WHO).
“In the cases we’ve seen so far in the UK, the vast majority of people recover on their own,” Ms Hopkins said.
She described monkeypox as ‘a new infectious disease that is spreading in our community’ with ‘cases that have no identified contact with an individual coming from West Africa’, where the disease was previously present. .
Transmission is seen “primarily in individuals who identify as gay or bisexual or in men who have sex with men,” she said, noting that transmission can be explained by “frequent contact narrow as they may have”.
She called for being alert to the slightest symptom while stressing that the risk for the population as a whole was “extremely low”.
While there is no vaccine for monkeypox, which is self-curing, a smallpox vaccine can be used to protect contact cases, Dr Hopkins explained.
Education Minister Nadhim Zahawi told the same TV channel that the government was taking the matter “very, very seriously” and that the UK had started buying doses of the smallpox vaccine.