(OPINION) 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”. Health officials have lost control of the new mutant strain that is spreading in Africa, and so that is why this move was made.
Compared to the strain that caused so much chaos in 2022, this new strain has a much higher death rate and we are being told that in many cases it is spreading without any sexual contact at all. If this thing gets loose in the United States and Europe, the level of fear that we will witness will be off the charts.
For now, the only confirmed cases of this new mutant strain of Monkeypox are all in central Africa.
But it is probably only a matter of time before it spreads to more areas.
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.
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.
The strategy of containment has officially failed.
At this point, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus is openly admitting that “the potential for further spread within Africa and beyond is very worrying”.
So what do we know about this new strain?
Well, first of all we are being told that it has a much higher death rate.
The strain of mpox spreading now (clade I) is more serious than the type we saw two years ago (clade II), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention explains. Clade I spreads more easily and could kill up to 10% of people who contract it. On the other hand, more than 99% of people who caught the clade II version in 2022 survived.
Secondly, it appears that it is much easier to spread than the strain that quickly circulated all over the planet in 2022…
During the global outbreak of mpox in 2022, gay and bisexual men made up the vast majority of cases and the virus was mostly spread through close contact, including sex. But with this outbreak in Congo, a majority of cases and deaths are in children. The reasons for the difference aren’t entirely clear. It could be because kids are more susceptible, said Dr. Boghuma Titanji, an infectious diseases expert at Emory University. Social factors, like overcrowding and exposure to parents who caught the disease, could also be at play.
Already, I am seeing so many people on the Internet spreading false information about this new strain.
Yes, this new strain can spread via sexual contact.
But it is being reported that it can also spread without any sexual contact at all.
If what we are being told is true, this could be really bad.
Previously, as long as people avoided certain types of sexual activity, they could feel safe.
But now that is apparently no longer the case.
According to one expert, this new strain is “undoubtedly the most dangerous of all the known strains”.
The new virus is “undoubtedly the most dangerous of all the known strains of mpox,” John Claude Udahemuka, a lecturer at the University of Rwanda, said in a press briefing on June 25. He said the virus has caused miscarriages and blindness.
Ultimately, I don’t know if Monkeypox will become a major global problem in the months ahead of not.
For decades, we all lived our lives without any concern that the next great global pandemic could be just around the corner.
Sadly, those days are gone.
We have all seen what fear of a pandemic that had a very low death rate did to the entire globe, and it is just a matter of time before much more serious pandemics come along.
In laboratories all over the world, scientists are purposely trying to make some of the deadliest diseases that we have ever known even more deadly.
