Following last month’s menopause outbreak in countries such as Portugal, Spain and the United Kingdom – where the outbreak rarely occurs – a quick, global response followed, including the distribution of vaccines abroad. But for years the monkeypox outbreak has occurred in parts of Central and West Africa, leaving African researchers frustrated that such resources are not available in their home countries, where the incidence of this disease is very high. They point out that they have been warning for a long time that the new moxxox flu could spread.
So far this year, there have been more than 3,000 confirmed cases of monkeypox in Central and West Africa, but no fatalities have been reported. In Africa, however, health officials have reported that more than 70 people have died in suspected cases of measles. This is probably the lowest cost due to limited testing and surveillance capacity, says Dimie Ogoina, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Niger Delta in Amassoma, Nigeria. The current global outbreak will not improve the situation in Africa. “If we do not draw the global attention to this, many solutions will face the problem in Europe, but not in Africa,” he said. Africa; these were associated with the importation of animals into or by visiting travelers. The worst of these outbreaks was temporary in the United States in 2003, caused by animals from other countries and infected more than 70 people.
Meanwhile, other African countries have been experiencing the monopoly outbreak since scientists discovered the first human case in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in 1970. Although researchers do not know exactly which animals are infected with the virus, they do know. that it circulates among many species of mice and can transmit from animals to humans. The outbreak began in Nigeria in 2017, with more than 200 confirmed cases and 500 suspected cases of monkeypox. Over the past decade, the DRC has seen thousands of suspected cases, as well as hundreds of suspected deaths. In Central Africa, the type of monopoly virus that infects humans is extremely dangerous, and the mortality rate is estimated at 10%.
At Adesola Yinka-Ogunleye, a epidemiologist at the Nigeria Center for Disease Control in Abuja, the current global outbreak brought a sense of déjà vu. Prior to the Nigerian outbreak in 2017, the virus appeared to be confined to rural areas, where hunters came in contact with animals. It can make its presence known from fever and ‘fluid-filled’ sores on the face, hands and feet. After 2017, he and other epidemiologist’s warned that the virus was spreading in an unknown way: it originated in urban areas, and people with the virus sometimes had genital sores, suggesting that the virus could be spread through sexual contact. As the virus is now on the rise in Western cities through what appears to be a close proximity to sexual partners, “the world is paying the price for inadequate response” in 2017, he said. In part, this is because countries have stopped providing humans with vaccines for smallpox, caused by variola, a virus closely related to the monkey virus. Smallpox was abolished in 1980 and vaccination was stopped, meaning that the percentage of people at risk – as well as monkeys – was growing.
Source Journal Reference: Max Kozlov, Monkeypox in Africa: the science the world ignored, nature News (2022), https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-01686-z
