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Excerpt from lidblog.com
It was fun while it lasted. We actually had quite a few months without an official “global health emergency” to be concerned about, but now that streak is over. On Wednesday, the World Health Organization announced that Monkeypox has officially been classified as a “public health emergency of international concern”…
The head of the committee that determined that a “public health emergency of international concern” was warranted says that this new strain is an emergency “for the entire globe”…
Committee Chair Professor Dimie Ogoina said, “The current upsurge of mpox in parts of Africa, along with the spread of a new sexually transmissible strain of the monkeypox virus, is an emergency, not only for Africa, but for the entire globe. Mpox, originating in Africa, was neglected there, and later caused a global outbreak in 2022. It is time to act decisively to prevent history from repeating itself.”]
Originally, all of the confirmed cases of the “clade 1b” strain were limited to the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
But now more than 100 cases have been confirmed in the neighboring countries of Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, and Uganda…
In the past month, over 100 laboratory-confirmed cases of clade 1b have been reported in four countries neighbouring the DRC that have not reported mpox before: Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda. Experts believe the true number of cases to be higher as a large proportion of clinically compatible cases have not been tested.