The World Health Organization (WHO) has called for all contacts with infected people to be tracked.
“Case definitions and delimitations are currently being developed in order to be able to implement adequate case and contact person management as part of a reporting obligation,” said the health department. Uniform international guidelines are needed to decide whether monkeypox should be one of the notifiable diseases in the future and whether infected people should also be quarantined. This involves a consistent case definition, i.e., for example, which parameters are used to diagnose and prove the disease. Laboratory PCR tests could also be used to detect monkeypox.
Known symptoms
Until a uniform international procedure has been decided, the health authorities will proceed according to the known symptoms. In the course of today, Friday, the Ministry of Health will therefore send an information letter to the federal states, the specialist societies and doctors. This should contribute to increased awareness and sensitivity to the infection, which is very rare in itself, in healthcare facilities.
Lots of guesses
There are several assumptions as to why monkeypox is apparently increasing and spreading right now. On the one hand, the renewed increase in travel “after Covid”, when travel was much less possible or sometimes not possible at all due to the fight against the pandemic, could contribute to this. On the other hand, the authorities, but also the media and the population, are probably more sensitive to zoonoses and their possible consequences as a result of the experience with Corona – like SARS-CoV-2, monkeypox is a disease that jumped from animals to humans. “Covid has shown the serious danger that zoonoses can pose and how important it is to have a holistic understanding of human, animal and environmental health – i.e. the One Health approach,” a spokesman for the Ministry of Health told APA about the lessons learned the corona pandemic.
The fact that “smallpox” is generally more in the spotlight again could also be due to an exercise by the G7 countries and the WHO, which are currently running a simulation to better combat future pandemics. Assumption is the outbreak of a smallpox pandemic from a leopard bite. In the course of the G7 meeting, it should be reported on and on the “constantly increasing threat” from zoonoses such as animal smallpox, it was said on Thursday. The G7 health ministers are currently discussing a global pandemic pact in Berlin.
Source: Nachrichten
