The World Health Organization (WHO) is certainly not sitting on its hands and has declared “monkeypox” a global health emergency as viruses exceed the mark of 16,000 outside of Africa. Not only this, the situation is getting worse day by day and a lot of countries have come under the confinement of this deadly virus in just a few weeks. The situation is going out of hand now, and seeing the prevailing conditions, the director general of WHO, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said in his recent announcement today, “The virus constituted a public health emergency of international concern.”
Coupled with this, the director general is taking some big and timely steps to mitigate the potential impacts of this virus and control the situation before it goes out of hand like the recent pandemic of COVID-19. He stated, “We have an outbreak that has spread around the world rapidly through new modes of transmission, about which we understand too little and which meets the criteria.” However, it has been stated in May by WHO that the situation can be controlled if we take immediate action and follow the precautionary steps.
But given the current situation, the authorities hope to make good on those promises. Furthermore, Sylvie Briand, who is acting as WHO director for Global Infectious Hazard Preparedness, stated, “We think that if we put in place the right measures now, we can probably contain this easily. We don’t know if we are just seeing the peak of the iceberg [or] if there are many more cases that are undetected in communities. ” He added, “For us, we think that the key priority currently is trying to contain this transmission in non-endemic countries. Early detection and isolation of cases and contact tracing were necessary to contain the outbreak. “
On the other hand, there are some health experts who say the steps taken by WHO are “short-sighted and overly cautious.” However, as per the numbers, the cases reported since June are now five times more, and for their own good, the authorities are taking these steps. To that end, Dr. Boghuma Titanji, who is an infectious diseases physician at Emory University in Atlanta, is in favor of these decisions and regarded them as “better late than never.”
She further stated, “One can argue that the response globally has continued to suffer from a lack of coordination, with individual countries working at very different paces to address the problem. There is almost a capitulation that we cannot stop the monkeypox virus from establishing itself in a more permanent way.”