The World Health Organization has no evidence that its virus smallpox of monkeys has mutated, a senior United Nations official said Monday, noting that the infectious disease endemic to West and Central Africa tends not to change.
Rosamond Lewis, head of the smallpox secretariat, told a news conference that mutations in the virus are usually milder, although the sequence of the case genome will help to understand the current epidemic.
According to Maria van Kerkov, head of the Department of Emerging Diseases and Zoonoses, the more than 100 suspected and confirmed cases detected in Europe and North America are not serious.
“This is a situation that can be controlled, especially in countries where we are witnessing the spread of the epidemic in Europe,” he said, adding that the spread of the virus “could be stopped” in countries where it is not endemic.
Scientists are trying to understand the origin of the cases and whether anything has changed in the virus smallpox of monkeys.
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