A co-ordinated international response is essential to stop this outbreak and save lives,
We do need the manufacturers to really scale up so that we've got access to many, many more vaccines,
Right now, the CDC estimates that risk to the U.S. is low, but as we have seen multiple times over the past few years, infections and outbreaks that start in other countries can quickly spread to the U.S.,
Availability of vaccines is very limited, representing a major bottleneck for the control strategies,
A coordinated global effort to contain MPXV spread in Africa may prevent what happened in 2022 from happening again. There was an ongoing clade 2 MPXV outbreak in Nigeria since 2017, with evidence of sustained human-to-human transmission, but this situation only caught global attention when it spread to several Western countries and caused the international outbreak in 2022."
If we can vaccinate individuals at risk they will be protected from infection and this will help control the epidemic – so both benefit the person vaccinated and the broader population,
Some people become much more unwell and they may develop a more severe illness with hundreds of lesions all over the body,
It’s a disease. Whether you get the severe form – then it leads to death – or you just recover [in] two to four weeks. Everything goes back to normal,
There is no vaccine in Africa. Whatever is left of that vaccine is stockpiled in the West as part of their own emergency preparedness. But we have an ongoing emergency here,
A lot of the transmission is in densely populated areas with many children, and children are probably more prone to running around and coming into direct skin-to-skin contact with others – so that then causes transmission. Whereas adults have less direct contact with others,
For example, people with untreated HIV [a sexually transmitted illness] or a weak immune system are at still higher risk of severe disease. Children also seem to be at higher risk of severe disease,
Beyond the fact that all infections obviously transiently cause responses in the immune system, we don’t believe there are long-term impacts on the immune system from mpox,
There are likely to be small numbers of cases exported further afield, as [in] the Swedish case, but the major risk and the focus for action needs to be on central Africa,
There is, however, vaccination, which is effective at reducing risk. The priority needs to be getting an adequate supply of vaccine to those populations most at risk in DRC and surrounding countries,
We have what we need to stop mpox,
We are actually in a good place to get control of this pandemic, but we have to make the decision to prioritize Africa,
There is talk that there are more people that have lesions around the genitals this time around than previous clade I outbreaks,
The underlying health conditions of the population in the DRC are probably contributing to the current case fatality rate,
We should have learned a lesson from 2022 that an infection anywhere is potentially an infection everywhere,
As a result of the rapid spread of this outbreak in Africa, ECDC has increased the level of risk for the general population in the EU/EEA and travelers to affected areas,