With 132 confirmed cases in Quebec, the province’s interim director of public health says the spread of monkeypox is slowly advancing every day and that vaccination efforts are now expanding to men hoping to have sex with other men. in Montreal this summer.
Quebec has 40,000 doses of the vaccine, and Montreal officials expect 25,000 doses to cover the city’s target population.
“There are certainly cases we haven’t seen because it’s an insidious disease that doesn’t show many symptoms,” Dr. Luc Boileau told a news conference Monday.
Montreal’s director of public health, Dr. Mylène Drouin, said the city was the epicenter of the US outbreak.
To date, more than 3,000 doses of vaccine have been administered, with officials focusing on those who may have been exposed to the virus. The vaccine is now available to anyone who may have sex with other men in the coming months, Drouin said.
“By expanding vaccination, we are trying to prevent the spread, knowing that we will have visitors, we will have different events, that will put people at risk,” he said.
“I don’t know if we can have zero cases, but we believe we can at least manage the current outbreak and minimize the number of new cases.”
Superspreader event in Montreal
It is believed that a traveler attended an event, now considered a broadcast event, in Montreal in late April and caused the transmission to the community, with cases arising in May, he explained.
He noted that this outreach event occurred at the same time as other outbreaks took place in several European cities.
The fact that there are many anonymous contacts resulting from this event makes it more difficult to trace possible transmissions and contain the disease, Drouin said.
So far, 126 cases have been investigated in Montreal and there have been three hospitalizations. There are currently no patients in the hospital and most cases are not serious, he said.
Drouin said 100 percent of cases in Montreal are male and most had sexual intercourse with other men. He said the disease is spreading widely through long, intimate, skin-to-skin contact.
“We currently have an outbreak that is really focused on a specific community,” he said.
“For the general population, we are not seeing new transmission chains that could be linked to other population groups.”
This is similar to what Canada’s director of public health, Dr. Theresa Tam, said at the end of last week.
He said all patients are men between the ages of 20 and 63, and most of them had sex with other men, but stressed that the infection can be spread to anyone who is exposed through close contact. with an infected or contaminated person. objects.
The WHO is discussing the situation of smallpox
The World Health Organization will convene an emergency committee next week to talk about the smallpox of the monkey, as worldwide there have been 1,600 confirmed cases and 1,500 suspected smallpox this year and 72 deaths in 39 countries, including those where the virus is commonly spread. Smallpox is endemic in some parts of Africa.
Boileau said public health is working to address the problem in Montreal and the rest of Quebec.
“We’ve done a lot of interventions, particularly here in Montreal,” Boileau said.
According to Quebec public health, monkeypox can spread from the onset of symptoms until the scabs covering the skin lesions have come off and a layer of healthy skin has formed. The incubation period is usually one week or less, but can last up to 21 days.
In most cases, the disease resolves on its own in two to four weeks and complications are rare, the health agency says, and high-risk contacts can be vaccinated with a single dose within four days. subsequent to the exhibition.