The World Health Organization (WHO) declared on Thursday the end of the international emergency due to the outbreak of monkeypox or simica, declared in July last year before a disease that has affected at least 87,000 people in 111 countries, with 140 deaths.

The decision was announced at a press conference by WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, a day after the emergency committee met to review the situation of the outbreak on a quarterly basis, whose cases have fallen by 90 percent in the last three months.

The international emergency for this disease, called mpox by the WHO, is lifted six days after this UN agency did the same in the case of the covid-19 pandemic, also in response to the decrease in cases and deaths, so only this level of maximum alert for polio is maintained.

"I am pleased to declare that mpox is no longer an international emergency, but as with COVID-19, that does not mean that it has ceased to be a public health challenge," Tedros said today, noting that "the virus still affects communities in all regions, including Africa," where the disease is endemic.

The Ethiopian expert added that monkeypox continues to pose risks to certain patients, such as carriers of the HIV virus, while the fact that infections continue to occur among people who carry out international travel "shows that the threat continues."

Tedros therefore called on national health networks to maintain their capacities to trace and diagnose possible cases "in order to act quickly if necessary", strengthening their integration into health systems.

At the same press conference, the vice-president of the emergency committee for monkeypox, Nicola Low, recalled that the first cases of the outbreak occurred a year ago (in the United Kingdom) and that the peak of infections occurred in July and August.

"Since then, the reduction in the number of infections has been impressive, the result of action by public health networks, international cooperation and affected communities," he said.

Many of those affected were men who have sex with other men, which led the WHO to fear that the outbreak would lead to cases of discrimination and homophobia as once happened with HIV-AIDS, although Tedros acknowledged today that finally these problems were less than expected.

"We feared backlash towards the hardest-hit communities that did not materialize across the board and we are grateful for that," he said.

In the past three weeks, just 200 cases have been reported worldwide, a 34 percent decrease from the previous 21 days.

In the ten months of the outbreak, America ended up being the region that declared the most infections, with more than 59,000 cases, followed by Europe (25,000) and Africa (1,500), the latter continent where there were already outbreaks of the disease in the past four decades.

By countries, the ones that confirmed the most cases were the United States (30,154), Brazil (10,940), Spain (7,551), France (4,146), Colombia (4,090), Mexico (4,010) and Peru (3,800).

  • Monkeypox

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