A top official of the UN World Health Organisation (WHO) has on Tuesday said that European governments must show strong political commitment to eliminate mpox while standing in solidarity with Africa.
\nHans Kluge, WHO regional director for Europe, while briefing journalists in Geneva, insisted mpox is \u201cnot the \u2018new COVID\u2019\u201d and that the risk from mpox to the general population was \u201clow.\u201d<\/p>\n
He rejected comparisons between the fast-spreading viral disease, which the agency declared an international public health emergency last week, and the COVID-19 pandemic.<\/p>\n
He said that, regardless of whether it\u2019s mpox clade 1, behind the ongoing outbreak in east-central Africa, or mpox clade 2, behind the 2022 outbreak that initially impacted Europe and has continued to circulate in Europe since.<\/p>\n
The UN health agency official\u2019s reply to whether Europe would experience COVID-19-like lockdowns was an unequivocal \u201cno.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr Kluge, speaking via video link from Copenhagen, recalled that the 2022 European mpox outbreak was brought under control \u201cthanks to the direct engagement with the most affected communities of men who have sex with men.\u201d<\/p>\n
He cited \u201cbehaviour change, non-discriminatory public health action and mpox vaccination\u201d as success factors in Europe in 2022. However, he said the region \u201cfailed to go the last mile\u201d to quash the disease and is currently seeing some 100 new mpox clade II cases every month.<\/p>\n
The current state of alert due to clade 1, considered more severe, allows European health authorities to strengthen focus on clade 2 and eliminate it \u201conce and for all,\u201d Mr Kluge urged.<\/p>\n
The UN health agency representative called for European solidarity with Africa, notably regarding equitable vaccine access. WHO recommends using the MVA-BN or LC16 vaccines or the ACAM2000 vaccine when the others are unavailable. These have originally been developed against the now-eradicated disease smallpox.<\/p>\n
WHO spokesperson Tarik Ja\u0161arevi\u0107 said the producer of MVA-BN, Bavarian Nordic, \u201chas capacity to manufacture 10 million doses by end of 2025 and can already supply up to two million doses this year.\u201d<\/p>\n
As for LC16, which is a vaccine produced on behalf of the Government of Japan, he underscored that there is a \u201cconsiderable\u201d stockpile of this vaccine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A top official of the UN World Health Organisation (WHO) has on Tuesday said that European governments must show strong political commitment to eliminate mpox while standing in solidarity with Africa. Hans Kluge, WHO regional director for Europe, while briefing journalists in Geneva, insisted mpox is \u201cnot the \u2018new COVID\u2019\u201d and that the risk from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":44561,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[172],"tags":[493],"class_list":["post-44545","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-who"],"aioseo_notices":[],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44545","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44545"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44545\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44562,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44545\/revisions\/44562"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44561"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}