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The World Health Organization (WHO) will decide on Thursday whether to declare the monkey pox a global health emergency, prompting criticism from African scientists who say the disease has been a health crisis on their continent for years.
Discussions and consideration of the WHO response to the outbreak follow concerns about how the United Nations agency and governments around the world handled COVID-19 in early 2020.
A “public health emergency of international concern” is the WHO’s highest level of alert. The agency did not declare a pandemic, but began using the term to describe COVID-19 in March 2020.
For many governments around the world, this was the moment when they began to take action to contain the disease, which turned out to be too late to make a difference.
The monkey pox is not spreading as fast as COVID and there are already vaccines and medications for this disease, but it has again raised alarm around the world.
The number of people affected outside the African continent has reached 3,000 cases in more than 40 countries, according to the Reuters agency, and mostly among men who have sex with men. There are still no reports of deaths.
Viral disease, which causes flu-like symptoms and skin irritation, has been defined as endemic in some parts of Africa. The continent has recorded about 1,500 suspected cases since the beginning of 2022, of which 66 of them have resulted in death, according to official data.
“When a disease affects underdeveloped countries it is not an emergency. “It only becomes so when developed countries are affected.”
However, Nakoune said that if the WHO were to declare a state of emergency, this would be an important step.
The Global Emergency Committee is meeting in Geneva on Thursday to discuss steps to be taken to curb the spread of the disease. The panel includes experts from the most affected regions, who have also consulted with scientists, including Nakoune.
They will send a recommendation to the Director-General of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who will make the final decision on whether to declare a state of emergency.
The decision, if taken, sounds the alarm and could prompt further steps by the WHO, as well as increased attention from a member state.
The WHO has already given detailed instructions on the disease and said it is working on a mechanism for distributing treatments and vaccines.
Most experts agree that the release of monkeys technically meets the criteria for the WHO definition of “global emergency”. It is a sudden and unusual event that is spreading internationally and requires cooperation between countries.
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