A SENIOR Bahraini medic has allayed fears over the global spread of monkeypox, assuring the public that the virus was not linked in any way to Covid-19.
National Taskforce to Combat Coronavirus (Covid-19) monitoring committee head Lieutenant General Dr Manaf Al Qahtani, however, urged citizens and residents to be cautious and report to the concerned authority if they come in contact with a confirmed monkey pox case.
“It is important to point out that this disease has nothing to do with the coronavirus,” Dr Al Qahtani said on Twitter yesterday.
“However, we have to be vigilant because this virus has different attributes from the ones we are familiar with.”
Monkeypox is named after the animals in which it was discovered. The disease cropped up in 1958 among monkeys kept for research, according to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention – more than a decade before a human case was identified in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Since then, it has only been reported in humans in other central and western African countries. More than 450 cases have been reported in Nigeria since 2017, according to the CDC.
The pox-like disease is known to cause fever, skin rash, swollen lymph nodes and fatigue. Health experts have stressed that risk to the public remains low and most people don’t need to be immediately fearful of contracting the illness.
“Monkeypox shares the same symptoms as smallpox, however, it’s not as infectious or severe as the latter,” Dr Al Qahtani pointed out.
“The disease is known to spread between animals in the wild, while being very limited in spreading among humans.
“It spreads through close contact with blisters and not through the air, as is the case with the coronavirus. And it has an incubation period of up to three weeks from the day of contracting the virus to the appearance of the first symptom.”
Dr Al Qahtani said while there was no vaccine specifically for treating monkeypox, the jabs used to counter smallpox were 86 per cent effective in tackling the disease. It is used within the first four days of coming into contact with the virus, especially for those who have not taken the vaccine within the past three years.
“We had eliminated smallpox on a global level by the end of 1970s,” said Dr Al Qahtani.
“Bahrain started its vaccination campaign against smallpox way back in 1940, fully eliminating it from the nation since then.”
However, Dr Al Qahtani urged citizens and residents to be vigilant following a global uptick in cases.
“The increase in cases globally goes against what we already know about the disease,” he said.
“We have to observe the presence of confirmed cases who had no relations to the country of origin, or had direct contact with an infected person, which is contrary to the known transmission methods for the virus.”
He stressed the need for health workers to observe and report patients showing monkeypox symptoms and for people to approach the medical authority if they had come in contact with a confirmed case or visited the country of origin of the virus.
Monkeypox is usually mild, although there are two main strains: the Congo strain, which is more severe – with up to 10pc mortality – and the West African strain, which has a fatality rate of more like 1pc of cases.
More than 100 cases of monkeypox have been reported in Europe, with German officials describing the outbreak as the largest ever in the region. Spain has confirmed 21 cases, Portugal 14 and UK announced 20 infections. Italy reported three cases, Belgium and Canada two each while Germany, France, Australia, US and Sweden have also registered one case each.
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