Monkeypox transmission can be contained in non-endemic countries, says WHO

Human-to-human transmission of monkeypox “can be stopped in non-endemic countries,” the WHO said on Monday.

“We want to stop person-to-person transmission. We can do this in non-endemic countries. It is a situation that can be controlled,” said Maria Van Kerkhove, director of the fight against Covid-19 and for emerging diseases and zoonoses at the WHO.

According to her, at least 200 confirmed and suspected cases have been reported so far.

“We are in a situation where we can turn to public health tools of early detection and supervised case isolation,” he explained.

“We can stop human-to-human transmission,” he insisted.

The specialist indicated that transmission also occurs by “close physical contact: skin contact” and that, in most of the identified cases, people did not develop any serious form of the disease.

Rosamund Lewis, who heads the WHO secretariat for monkeypox in the UN agency’s emergencies programme, said the disease had been known for at least four decades and that few cases had been detected in Europe in the past five years in people who had traveled to regions where the pathology is endemic.

However, “this is the first time that we have seen cases in many countries and, at the same time, in people who have not traveled to endemic regions of Africa,” he explained, citing Nigeria, Cameroon, the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Lewis said it is not known whether the virus has mutated, but that the group of orthopoxvirus —to which monkeypox belongs—”it does not tend to mutate, but to remain stable.”

On the other hand, Andy Seale, strategic advisor on WHO programs for HIV, hepatitis and sexually transmitted diseases, argued that while the virus can be transmitted through sexual contact, it is not a sexually transmitted disease.

“Anyone can get smallpox from close contact,” he said.