Guwahati: The World Health Organization (WHO), the monkeypox outbreak continues to meet the requirements for a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) under the International Health Regulations (IHR).
“The Emergency Committee acknowledged that some progress has been made in the global response to the multi-country outbreak of monkeypox since the last meeting, including the emerging information on the effectiveness of behavioural interventions and vaccines,” the WHO said in a statement.
This comes after the third IHR Emergency Committee meeting on Thursday discussing the multi-nation monkeypox outbreak.
The IHR Emergency Committee’s third meeting on the multi-nation monkeypox outbreak was held by videoconference. Six of the Committee’s nine advisors and eleven of its fifteen members attended the meeting.
In his opening remarks, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus welcomed the Committee and noted a global decline in cases that was encouraging, though progress in the Americas and Africa, where cases are rising in some countries and underreporting is likely in others, is less certain, according to national media.
The WHO Secretariat provided the Committee with an update on the epidemiological situation on a worldwide scale as well as on the fast advancing scientific understanding of the disease’s clinical manifestation and course of development.
The Secretariat observed that many additional nations have swiftly responded to the epidemic with a range of public health initiatives and that cases are decreasing globally since the determination of the PHEIC on July 23, this year.
Despite this, the situation is complicated and the WHO Secretariat’s risk assessment ultimately finds that as of 18 October 2022, the public health risk remains moderate worldwide.
The risk was deemed to be high in the WHO region of the Americas, moderate in the European region, moderate in the WHO regions of Africa, the Eastern Mediterranean, and South-East Asia, and low in the Western Pacific region, according to the WHO.
Over 70,000 confirmed cases of monkeypox have been documented thus far in more than 100 nations. Men have been the majority of cases recorded.