coordination, with individual countries working at very different paces to address the problem,” she adds. “There is almost capitulation that we cannot stop the monkeypox virus from establishing itself in a more permanent way.”
Governments need to prepare for new epidemics without notice, Tom Inglesby, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in Baltimore, told the Times.
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After a global COVID pandemic, this is news you don’t want to hear. However, according to experts, this is the new normal.
“As much as the world is tired of infectious disease crises, they are part of a new normal that is going to demand a lot of ongoing attention and resources,” he shares. “We need global vaccine and therapeutics production and stockpiling approaches that don’t yet exist.”
Not coordinating a response has also meant lost opportunities to collect data in large multinational studies.
“This inability to characterize the epidemiological situation in that region represents a substantial challenge to designing interventions for controlling this historically neglected disease,” Tedros said about the West and Central African countries where monkeypox is endemic, the Times reported.
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What to expect with monkeypox
If you contract monkeypox, there are a few symptoms you can expect.
Symptoms in the latest monkeypox outbreak include lesions in the throat, urethra and rectum that can be very painful. Fever, body aches or respiratory symptoms are typically associated with the disease, but those symptoms are not being experienced by all during this outbreak, the Times reports.
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Meanwhile, recent genetic analyses of samples from infected patients showed the monkeypox genome has collected nearly 50 genetic mutations since 2018, far more than the six or seven it would have been expected to express in that period.
Whether the mutations have changed the transmission, severity or other qualities of the virus isn’t clear, but the data hints that monkeypox may be spreading more easily since 2018. Around 99% of cases reported outside of Africa this year were among men and 98% among men who have sex with men, according to CNBC.
However, experts have made it clear that anyone can catch monkeypox. In fact, experts believe that the virus may begin