Monkey

No confirmed monkeypox case in PH

June 26, 2022 People's Tonight 246 views

NO confirmed case of monkeypox has been detected in the Philippines so far, the Department of Health (DOH) said Saturday.

In a Laging Handa briefing, Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire said local government units continue to submit samples from “suspect cases” to the Research Institute for Tropical Medicine (RITM) for verification.

“As of today, wala pa tayong nakukumpirma sa monkeypox (As of today, we don’t have a confirmed case of monkeypox yet),” she said.

The World Health Organization (WHO) in May 2022 reported outbreaks of monkeypox in non-endemic countries.

Between January to June 15, 2022, a total of 2,103 confirmed cases and one death due to the virus have been logged in 42 countries, including those where monkeypox is endemic.

The WHO said the risk at the global level is moderate “considering this is the first time that many monkeypox cases and clusters are reported concurrently in many countries in widely disparate WHO geographical areas, balanced against the fact that mortality has remained low in the current outbreak.”

Based on its latest data, more than 90 percent of the cases have been reported from May up to June 15, 2022.

Not a global health emergency

The World Health Organization on Saturday said the rapid spread of monkeypox across dozens of nations does not represent a global health emergency at this time.

WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus described monkeypox as an evolving health threat.

However, he urged governments around the world to step up surveillance, contact tracing, testing and to make sure that people at high risk have access to vaccines and antiviral treatments.

The WHO convened its emergency committee to determine what level of threat monkeypox currently poses to the international community.

At least 3,000 monkeypox cases across over 50 countries have been identified since early May, according to WHO data.

Monkeypox may soon have a new name after scientists called for a change to dispel stereotypes of Africa being seen as a crucible of disease.

New name

The World Health Organization announced last week that it is “working with partners and experts from around the world on changing the name of monkeypox virus, its clades and the disease it causes.”

Monkeypox’s clades, which are different branches of the virus’ family tree, have been particularly controversial because they are named after African regions.

Last year the WHO officially named Covid-19 variants after Greek letters to avoid stigmatising the places where they were first detected.

Just days before the WHO announced it would change monkeypox’s name, a group of 29 scientists wrote a letter saying there is an “urgent need for a non-discriminatory and non-stigmatising nomenclature” for the virus.

The letter, signed by several prominent African scientists, called for the names of the “West African” and the “Central African” or “Congo Basin” monkeypox clades to be changed.

Until a few months ago, monkeypox had largely been confined to West and Central Africa.

But since May, a new version has spread across much of the world. The letter’s signatories suggested naming this version as a new clade, giving it “the placeholder label hMPXV” — for human monkeypox virus.

Out of the more than 2,100 monkeypox cases recorded globally this year, 84 percent were in Europe, 12 percent in the Americas and just three percent in Africa, according to the WHO’s latest update last week.

‘Not a monkey disease’

Oyewale Tomori, a virologist at Redeemer’s University in Nigeria, said he supported changing the name of monkeypox’s clades.

“But even the name monkeypox is aberrant. It is not the right name,” he told AFP.

“If I were a monkey, I would protest because it’s not really a monkey disease.”

The virus was named after it was first discovered among monkeys in a Danish lab in 1958, but humans have mostly contracted the virus from rodents.

The letter pointed out that “nearly all” outbreaks in Africa were sparked by people catching the virus from animals — not from other people.

But the current outbreak “is unusual in that it is purely spreading through human to human transmission,” said Olivier Restif, an epidemiologist at the University of Cambridge.

“So, it is fair to say that the current outbreak has very little to do with Africa, in the same way that the Covid-19 waves and variants we’re still being battered by have little to do with the Asian bats from which the virus originally came a few years ago.”

‘Stigmatization of Africa’

Moses John Bockarie of Sierra Leone’s Njala University said he agreed with the call to change monkeypox’s name.

“Monkeys are usually associated with the global south, especially Africa,” he wrote in The Conversation.

“In addition, there is a long dark history of black people being compared to monkeys. No disease nomenclature should provide a trigger for this.”

Restif said it was “important to highlight that this debate is part of a larger issue with stigmatisation of Africa as a source of disease.”

“We’ve seen it most strikingly with HIV in the 1980s, with Ebola during the 2013 outbreak and again with Covid-19 and the reactions to the so-called ‘South African variants’,” he told AFP.

An African press group has also expressed “its displeasure against media outlets using images of black people alongside stories of the monkeypox outbreak in North America and the United Kingdom.

“We condemn the perpetuation of this negative stereotype that assigns calamity to the African race and privilege or immunity to other races,” The Foreign Press Association, Africa tweeted last month.

Restif pointed out that the “old stock photographs of African patients” used by Western media usually depict severe symptoms.

But the monkeypox spreading around the world “is much milder, which partly explains how easily it gets transmitted,” he said.

The WHO will announce the new monkeypox names “as soon as possible”, its chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.

The UN agency is also holding an emergency committee meeting on Thursday to assess whether the outbreak represents a public health emergency of international concern — the highest alarm it can sound. PNA & AFP

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