This 2003 electron microscope image shows mature, oval-shaped monkeypox virions, left, and spherical immature virions, right. Monkeypox has been identified by European and American health authorities in recent days.Photo / via AP
This 2003 electron microscope image shows mature, oval-shaped monkeypox virions, left, and spherical immature virions, right. Monkeypox has been identified by European and American health authorities in recent days.Photo / via AP
The World Health Organisation is reportedly convening an emergency meeting to discuss the alarming spread of the monkeypox virus around the world.
The United Nations' health authority is bringing together leading experts on the rare disease as a number of new countries announced their first confirmed cases on Friday, according to the Daily Telegraph.
Eleven countries — including Australia, the US, Spain and Italy — have now detected monkeypox, in the first global outbreak of its kind.
In the UK, the number of cases of monkeypox doubled on Friday.
This 1997 image provided by CDC shows the right arm and torso of a patient whose skin displayed a number of lesions due to monkeypox. Photo / via AP
The main concern is how the virus — usually concentrated in West Africa — may be spreading, with many of the new cases detected in people who had not recently travelled to Africa.
The WHO will also be examining why clusters include gay and bisexual men, the paper said, with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and British and Australian authorities issuing similar warnings.
Dr Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO Health Emergencies Programme, is believed to be in attendance.
One potential course of action to be raised will be whether vaccination with the smallpox vaccine should be used for contacts of people known to be infected.
The vaccine is only approved in the UK for protection against smallpox — despite the virus being eliminated since 1980 — but can be used "off-licence" to protect against monkeypox.
Data show the vaccine, which is the only non-replicating virus in the world for smallpox or monkeypox, reduces a person's risk of disease by 85 per cent.
Smallpox vaccination was stopped in the UK in 1971 and less than one in three people globally now have immunity to the pox viruses.
Prof Anne Rimoin, professor of epidemiology at the UCLA and a world-renowned monkeypox expert, told the Telegraph that vaccinating close contacts of confirmed cases, also known as ring vaccination, is a good option for health officials.
This 2003 electron microscope image shows mature, oval-shaped monkeypox virions, left, and spherical immature virions, right. Monkeypox has been identified by European and American health authorities in recent days.Photo / via AP
"We do have a vaccine that works but I doubt that we will need widespread vaccination, but ring vaccination may be a relevant strategy. It was a very relevant strategy for smallpox. It is how we eradicated smallpox," she said.
"I started working on monkeypox in 2002 in DRC. Now, 20 years later, the vast majority of the world has no immunity to pox viruses.
"The big issue is that now the world is no longer, by and large, immune to pox viruses, we'll see more cases.
"As the world becomes more susceptible to pox viruses and we have exposures over time, you know, because of increased travel rate etc, we can expect to see more cases."
However, she did say that the public should not, at this stage, be too concerned.
There are two main strains of monkeypox: the Congo strain, which is more severe – with up to 10 per cent mortality – and the West African strain, which has a fatality rate of about 1 per cent.
The rare disease often manifests itself through fever, muscle aches, swollen lymph nodes, chills, exhaustion and a chickenpox-like rash on the hands and face.
It can be transmitted through contact with skin lesions and droplets of a contaminated person, as well as through shared items such as bedding and towels.
Cases of monkeypox have been detected across Europe and North America.
The first European case was confirmed on May 7 in an individual who returned to England from Nigeria, where monkeypox is endemic. Since then, cases have also been confirmed in Italy, Portugal, Spain, Belgium, Sweden, the United States and Canada.
Cases of monkeypox have recently doubled in the UK as a further 11 infections were confirmed, bringing the total to 20 in Britain. Earlier this week it was revealed that the latest infected Britons live in London and the southeast.
France and Germany on Friday reported their first cases of monkeypox.
Monkeypox was identified in a 29-year-old man in the Ile-de-France region, which includes Paris, who had not recently returned from a country where the virus is circulating, France's health authorities said Friday.
Meanwhile, Australia last night confirmed two cases, including one man in his 30s who had travelled from Britain to Melbourne with symptoms earlier this week.
Should be taken seriously
Jimmy Whitworth, professor of international public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, cautioned that monkeypox "isn't going to cause a nationwide epidemic like Covid did".
"But it's a serious outbreak of a serious disease – and we should take it seriously," he said.
The expectation is this outbreak can be contained by contact tracing, like all previous monkeypox outbreaks, New Scientist reports.
While researchers aren't completely ruling out a pandemic, they don't think it is at all likely.
"I don't think the science points to that at this moment," says John Brownstein at Boston Children's Hospital. "It's important not to put this on the same level as a novel coronavirus."
Some researchers have previously warned that monkeypox is a growing threat.
"The emergence of monkeypox as a significant human pathogen is indisputably a realistic scenario," states a 2018 paper.
First detection
Human monkeypox was first identified in 1970 in Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo, in a 9-year-old boy in a region where smallpox had been eliminated two years earlier.
Since 1970, human cases of monkeypox have been reported in 11 African countries – Benin, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo, Gabon, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Nigeria, Republic of Congo, Sierra Leone and South Sudan, according to WHO.
In the spring of 2003, cases were also confirmed in the United States – the first time the disease surfaced outside Africa.
