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While US President Joe Biden said that the sudden rise in cases of monkeypox was something to be concerned about, top US health experts have said that it will not cause a Covid-19-like pandemic in the world.
Dr. Faheem Younus, Vice President and Chief Quality Officer at the University of Maryland Upper Chesapeake Health said that while monkeypox cases are concerning but the risk of this becoming a Covid-like pandemic is zero per cent. He added that the monkeypox virus is not novel unlike SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes Covid-19).
The world has known about Monkeypox for decades and has a deep understanding of the disease that belongs to the same virus family as smallpox. Dr. Faheem further added that the monkeypox virus is typically not deadly and is less contagious than coronavirus.
What’s most assuring is that there is a vaccine for the disease, unlike Covid-19, which was immune to previous vaccines and it took the world over a year to find treatment for the deadly pathogen.
President Biden, who is in Japan, calmed the nerves by stating that the viral infection will not rise to the level of Covid-19. Nearly 100 cases of the virus, largely endemic to west Africa have been reported in the US, UK, and Europe. “I just don’t think it rises to the level of the kind of concern that existed with COVID-19,” Biden said.
Biden said the smallpox vaccine works for monkeypox. Asked whether the U.S. has enough stockpile of that vaccine to handle the monkeypox spread, Biden said, “I think we do have enough to deal with the likelihood of a problem.”
A leading adviser to the World Health Organization described the unprecedented outbreak of monkeypox in developed countries as “a random event” that appears to have been caused by sexual activity at two recent raves in Europe. Dr. David Heymann, who formerly headed WHO’s emergency department, told The Associated Press that the leading theory to explain the spread of the disease was sexual transmission at raves held in Spain and Belgium.
“We know monkeypox can spread when there is close contact with the lesions of someone who is infected, and it looks like sexual contact has now amplified that transmission,” said Heymann. To date, WHO has recorded more than 90 cases of monkeypox in a dozen countries including Canada, Spain, Israel, France, Switzerland, the US, and Australia.
