The World Health Organization (WHO) has assured this Saturday that, for the time being, the monkeypox outbreak in Europe and in countries in other regions should not be considered an international health emergency, as is the case with covid-19. 19.
The decision has been made by the director general of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, following the recommendation of a group of experts convened to deliberate on the severity of the outbreak, as a sign of the concern that the increase in infected people is causing.
The WHO's emergencies committee held a meeting in Geneva on Thursday to assess whether the outbreak constitutes a "public health emergency of international concern."
This is the highest level of alert that the body can declare, a consideration that coronavirus and polio currently have.
The declaration of the international emergency aims to increase coordination between countries and strengthen the mechanisms for actively searching for cases and the implementation of measures that help curb the circulation of the virus.
Since the beginning of May, 3,040 cases of monkeypox have been reported from 47 countries.
Monkeypox maintains its upward trend in almost all of Europe.
With more than 2,000 confirmed cases in 28 countries on the continent, the chains of contagion remain uncontrolled in the three capitals that were hit first - London, Madrid and Lisbon - and the circulation of the virus is accelerating in two other large cities, Berlin and Paris, while also growing in countries like Belgium, the Netherlands and Italy.
Monkeypox is a zoonotic disease whose reservoir is in small rodents from central and western Africa.
From them, through fluids, it sporadically jumps to the human being and initiates chains of transmission that until now had been limited, since for one person to infect another, close contact is required such as that which occurs during sexual intercourse, although not only in them.