United States: Public health officers have raised the alarm over the Mpox virus, arguing that this is a deadly virus with the potential to mutate faster than previously predicted.
More about the news
The recent increase of cases in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and other African countries has been classified as a public health emergency of international concern by the World Health Organisation, making it as important as COVID-19, Ebola, and Mpox outbreaks in 2022.
The new strain, called Clade 1b, is known to have elevated infectivity, structure, and flexibility provided by type 1 platforms, a dual tropism predominantly via the sexual route, mirror.co.uk reported.
What do the experts have to say?
Several doctors in Nigeria are bothered, with one saying the virus is ‘mutating’ much faster than we thought. Dr Dimie Ogoina, an infectious diseases expert at Niger Delta University Hospital, told NDTV: “I worry that in Africa, we are working blindly.”
“We don’t understand our outbreak very well, and if we don’t understand our outbreak very well, we will have difficulty addressing the problem in terms of transmission dynamics, the severity of the disease, and the risk factors of the disease. And I worry about the fact that the virus seems to be mutating and producing new strains,” Ogoina continued.
The spread of cases
As reported by data from the UK Health Security Agency UKHSA, England has reported 269 total Mpox cases for the period 2023 to 2024.
Up to now, no incidences of this new strain of mpox transmitting across Africa have been experienced in the UK. There has been a new confirmed case this week of a man in Thailand infected with the new strain apart from the one detected in Sweden a while back.
At the beginning of this month, Professor Paul Hunter from the University of East Anglia said that the serious new variant “may well be here” in Britain already owing to delays in testing and diagnosis.
Dr Hunter noted, “If I was to bet, I’d bet on it already being in the country because by the time you get infected and diagnosed to understand what Clade it is, you’re looking at around two weeks,” as mirror.co.uk reported.
Thus, during the last year ending June, notifications of infectious diseases (NOIDs) revealed 90 suspected cases of mpox to the UKHSA. These NOIDs are important notifications that GPs have to make to the UKHSA whenever they have cause to believe that there is an instance of some of the notifiable infectious diseases, which include mpox, to act as an early warning of the outbreak in the various regions.
Mpox, formerly called monkeypox, is an acute contagious disease that is caused by a virus. It may result in flu-like symptoms such as fever and body aches, but the most apparent symptoms of this disease are skin rash or pustular eruptions that may take between two to four weeks to heal.