Monkeypox no longer a global health emergency
Call cames a week after the WHO removed the designation from the Covid-19 outbreak.
The World Health Organisation declared on Thursday that mpox no longer constitutes a global health emergency, a year after the disease formerly known as monkeypox started spreading across the world.
In the wake of falling cases numbers, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said he was “pleased to declare” he had accepted the advice of the UN agency’s emergency committee on mpox to lift its highest level of alarm.
The announcement came just a week after the WHO said Covid also no longer constitutes a public health emergency of international concern.
Though long present in parts of Central and West Africa, mpox cases started emerging in May last year in Europe and North America then elsewhere, mostly among men who have sex with men.
The WHO declared mpox was a PHEIC in July. But the number of people infected with the disease – which causes fever, muscular aches and boil-like skin lesions – has consistently fallen since. More than 87,000 cases and 140 deaths have been reported from 111 countries during the global outbreak.
AFP
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