MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Mpox not the new Covid-19, WHO official explains

“Two years ago, we controlled mpox in Europe thanks to direct engagement with the most affected communities of men who have sex with men,” Kluge pointed out

Hans Kluge, the World Health Organization’s (WHO) regional director for Europe, admitted Tuesday that mpox would not lead to a “cycle of panic” and lockdowns like Covid-19 did, despite the public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC) declaration.

In a UN briefing on Tuesday, Kluge said that this time around the disease can be kept under control by supplying enough vaccines to the affected countries in Africa and closely monitoring the monkeypox patients. “Are we going to lockdown the WHO European region? Is it another Covid-19? The answer is clearly: ‘no,’” Kluge stressed.

“Two years ago, we controlled mpox in Europe thanks to direct engagement with the most affected communities of men who have sex with men,” he added.

“Will we choose to put the systems in place to control and eliminate mpox globally or will we enter another cycle of panic, then neglect?,” he also wondered.

The milder variant of the mpox virus, dubbed Clade 2, spread in 2022. Now, a more infectious strain, Clade 1b, has killed hundreds of people in central Africa and was detected last week in Sweden. The overwhelming majority of Clade 2 cases occurred among gay and bisexual men, particularly those with multiple sexual partners. Clade 1b is believed to spread more easily through close, non-sexual contact.

The world already knows “a lot” about mpox, so it cannot be considered “the new covid,” Kluge insisted. “Mpox is not the new covid. Whether it is mpox clade I, which caused the current epidemic in Central and East Africa, or mpox clade II, which caused the 2022″ epidemic, he added.

”We already know a lot about clade II. We still have a lot to learn about clade I,“ he also pointed out.

Faced with the increase in cases of mpox in the Democratic Republic of Congo, due to subtype Ib clade, which also affects Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, and Uganda, the WHO decided to declare an international public health emergency on Aug. 14, as it had done in 2022 when the mpox epidemic was caused by subtype clade IIB. The measure was lifted in May 2023.

The virus was discovered in 1958 in Denmark, in monkeys bred for research. In 1970, it was detected for the first time in a human, in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo with the spread of a clade I subtype, which was generally transmitted by contact with animals.

According to Catherine Smallwood of the WHO European office, no animal-to-human transmission of clade Ib has been detected so far. ”This appears to be a strain of the virus that circulates exclusively within the human population“ and ”is likely to be transmitted more efficiently between humans.“

”We know that clade I is more dangerous than clade II,” WHO Spokesman Tarik Jasarevic also explained.

Mpox is similar to human smallpox, which was eradicated in 1980, and is endemic in parts of west and central Africa. Its initial symptoms include fever, headache, muscle aches, backache, swollen lymph nodes, chills, and exhaustion, and those afflicted develop distinctive skin lesions.

Previously known as monkeypox, the disease was renamed mpox by the WHO in late 2022, with the organization claiming that the original name was “racist and stigmatizing.”