Merdeka.com – The World Health Organization (WHO) currently records more than 550 cases of monkeypox worldwide. This was conveyed by the technical head of the monkeypox group, Rosamund Lewis.
“Today, we actually recorded more than 550 confirmed cases in 30 countries in four of the six WHO regions,” he explained, quoted by CNN, Wednesday (1/6).
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“What we see today is very different,” he said, adding this was because monkeypox outbreaks occurred in many places at once.
“We saw all the cases showing up in a relatively short period of time. We saw that in a few days, in a few weeks, we saw there were more than 500 cases. It’s different. It’s never been seen before.”
In a weekend report, the WHO said that as of Thursday last week, it had received 257 confirmed cases of monkeypox and about 120 suspected cases in 23 countries where the virus is not endemic.
Lewis said the WHO did not know the source of the outbreak and asked countries to prevent cases from spreading into a larger outbreak.
The WHO says this level of global public health risk is moderate. But the UN health agency also warned that the health risk could be high if the virus continues to develop into a human pathogen and spread to groups at high risk of severe disease such as young children and people with compromised immunity.
The WHO urges health services to closely monitor people with symptoms such as rash, fever, headache, backache, muscle aches, lethargy and swollen lymph nodes and test anyone with these symptoms.
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