2024-08-17 15:34:41
Dr. Hossam Abdel Ghaffar, Egypt’s assistant minister of health and spokesman, said it was “extremely unlikely” that the virus that causes monkeypox would turn into a new pandemic, similar to what happened during the spread of the coronavirus.
Abdul Ghaffar added in a promotional post posted by the Ministry of Health on its social media account that “this seems unlikely as epidemics usually break out, including the recent one, Such as swine flu and Covid-19, both caused by airborne viruses.
The World Health Organization has previously declared “monkeypox” a global health emergency.
Abdul Ghaffar explained that the Mbox virus, also known as monkeypox, is primarily spread through close skin-to-skin contact with an infected person or their dirty clothes or linens, often causing visible skin lesions that make people less likely to May be in close contact with other people.
He stressed, “According to a spokesman for the Ministry of Health, scientists have said that in countries without ongoing Mbox outbreaks, the risk to the general population is lower, and he confirmed that smallpox spreads very slowly, unlike the coronavirus.”
He noted, “Shortly after the coronavirus was discovered in China, the number of cases increased dramatically from hundreds to thousands in one week in January, with the number of cases increasing more than tenfold.”
The World Health Organization has declared monkeypox a global health emergency.
The assistant secretary of health said that by March 2020, when the World Health Organization described Covid-19 as a pandemic, more than 126,000 people had been infected and 4,600 had died, about three months after the coronavirus was first identified, but By comparison, there have been nearly 100,000 cases of smallpox infection globally since 2022, and about 200 people have died, according to the World Health Organization.
Abdul Ghaffar stressed that unlike at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, there is a vaccine and treatment available for smallpox.
He added: “The world has everything it needs to stop smallpox, which is different from what we faced during COVID-19, when there was no vaccine and no antiviral drugs, but we need more coordination and integration at the global health level. achieve this goal.
A new strain of the virus discovered in the Democratic Republic of Congo in September 2023 is more deadly and more widespread than previous strains, raising concerns about its spread, according to AFP.
Monkeypox is an infectious disease caused by a virus that is transmitted to humans through infected animals and can also be transmitted from person to person through close physical contact.
On Wednesday, the World Health Organization declared the spread of monkeypox in Africa a global health emergency, the highest alert level the agency can issue.
Since the start of the year, 548 people have died in the Democratic Republic of Congo from monkeypox, a virus that was first discovered in humans in 1970 and has spread to other countries.
1723913818
#EgyptUAE #plans #Gulf #Suez #officially #unveiled
