With over 6,000 cases of monkey pox reported in 58 countries, the WHO (World Health Organization) will reconvene the entity’s emergency committee to define whether to declare the current outbreak a global health emergency, the level of alert the highest of the WHO.
According to general manager Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the meeting will take place in the week of July 18, or even earlier.
At its previous meeting on June 27, the committee decided that the epidemic – whose cases have increased in African countries, where the disease usually spreads, and on other continents – was not yet a health emergency. .
“I remain concerned about the scale and spread of the virus across the world,” Tedros said, adding that the lack of testing means many more cases have likely gone unreported.
According to real-time tracking by the Global.health initiative, which brings together researchers from universities such as Harvard and Oxford, the number of people infected worldwide exceeds 7,100.
Monkeypox, a usually mild viral infection that causes flu-like symptoms and skin lesions, has been spreading around the world since early May. The case fatality rate in epidemics that predate the strain that is currently spreading is around 1%.
Find out what science still intrigues about monkeypox
#Monkeypox #cases #meet #define #emergency #disease