Published on : 23/05/2022 – 01:39
Cases of monkey pox, an infectious disease from West Africa, have been identified in fifteen countries. In the UK, more cases are being recorded daily, reports the medical officer of the UK Health Security Agency.
Several European countries have identified case of monkeypox. Le UKthe epicenter of the disease, records new infections every day, an official from the British Health Security Agency said on Sunday May 22.
“We are detecting more cases every day,” Susan Hopkins, the chief medical officer of the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), told BBC television. Last week, twenty sick had been identified.
New UKHSA guidelines recommend that contact cases most at risk of monkeypox patients self-isolate for three weeks and avoid contact with immunocompromised people, pregnant women and children under the age of 12, SkyNews reported on Sunday.
“In the cases we’ve seen so far in the UK, the vast majority of people recover on their own,” Susan Hopkins said. She described monkeypox as ‘a new infectious disease that is spreading in our community’ with ‘cases that have no identified contact with an individual from West Africa’, where the disease was previously present. .
Purchases of vaccine doses
Transmission is seen “primarily in individuals who identify as homosexual or bisexual or in men who have sex with men”, she said, noting that the transmission can be explained by the “frequent contact narrow as they may have”.
She called for being alert to the slightest symptom while stressing that the risk for the population as a whole was “extremely low”.
While there is no vaccine for monkeypox, which is self-curing, a smallpox vaccine can be used to protect contact cases, Dr Hopkins explained.
The UK has started buying doses of the vaccine, Education Minister Nadhim Zahawi told the BBC.
No case of monkeypox on English tourist
In Greece, the situation seems under control. Serological tests carried out on an English tourist, the first suspected case of monkeypox in the country, did not detect the disease but chickenpox, assured the public health body on Sunday. “There are similar symptoms and appearances of similar skin lesions” between the two diseases, he said.
Several western countries of which France, Germany, Britain, the United States, Spain and Sweden have recorded cases.
Monkeypox or “simian orthopoxvirus” is a rare disease whose pathogen can be transmitted from animals to humans and vice versa. Its symptoms resemble, in less serious, those which one observed in the past at the subjects reached of smallpox: fever, headaches, muscular pains, dorsal, during the first five days. Then appear rashes, lesions, pustules and finally scabs.
There is no treatment for this disease which generally heals spontaneously and whose symptoms last 14 to 21 days.
With AFP
