The World Health Organization now has more than 550 cases of monkeypox worldwide, the group’s chief technical officer for monkeypox, Rosamund Lewis, told CNN International on Tuesday.
“Today we have a count of more than 550 confirmed cases in 30 countries in four of the six WHO regions,” Lewis said.
“What we’re seeing now is very different,” he said, as the outbreak is happening in several places at once.
“We’re seeing all the cases appear in a relatively short period of time. We’re seeing that in a few days, in a couple of weeks, we’re seeing more than 500 cases. That’s different. This hadn’t been seen before.”
In an update over the weekend, the WHO said that as of Thursday, it had received reports of 257 cases of confirmed smallpox and about 120 suspected cases in 23 countries where the virus is not endemic.
Lewis said the WHO does not know the origin of the outbreak and called on countries to take advantage of the “window of opportunity” to prevent cases from developing into a larger outbreak.
The group said in its weekend briefing that the level of risk to global public health is moderate, “given that this is the first time that cases and groups of smallpox have been reported simultaneously in areas geographical areas very different from the WHO and without known epidemiological links with non-endemic countries in West or Central Africa “.
However, he added: “The risk to public health could be high if this virus seizes the opportunity to establish itself as a human pathogen and spreads to groups most at risk of serious disease, such as now young children and immunocompromised people “.
WHO urges health care providers to monitor closely for possible symptoms such as rash, fever, swollen lymph nodes, headache, back pain, muscle aches and fatigue, and to offer tests to anyone with these. symptoms.
Speaking at a news conference Monday, Lewis said that “at the moment we are not worried about a global pandemic.”
The virus is not new, he told CNNI, but the WHO will meet this week to set a research agenda and research priorities for the virus.
“It’s been there before, and we have a knowledge base on which to build, but there are still a lot of questions,” he said.