While South Africa and the rest of the world continue to make strides in recovering from the Covid-19 pandemic, a new crisis has hit Europe and the US in the form of monkeypox, leaving many in Africa anxious.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the monkeypox outbreak has infected more than 100 people in nearly 20 countries including Britain, Portugal, Spain, Israel, Australia and the US.
Monkeypox is a rare disease, part of the same family as smallpox, though typically less severe.
It can cause flu-like symptoms, but monkeypox also triggers enlarged lymph nodes and, eventually, distinctive fluid-filled lesions on the face, hands and feet.
The infection typically lasts two to four weeks and usually clears up on its own.
During his visit to Asia on Sunday, US President Joe Biden said everybody should be worried about the spread of monkeypox, with his national security adviser assuring the US public that it had a vaccine ready to treat the virus.
“They haven’t told me the level of exposure yet but it is something that everybody should be concerned about,” said Biden.
South Africa’s National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) confirmed that there were no cases of monkeypox in South Africa and milder cases of monkeypox might go undetected which represented a risk of person-to-person transmission, reports IOL.
“The implications for SA are that the risk of importation of monkeypox is a reality as lessons learnt from Covid-19 have illustrated that outbreaks in another part of the world can fast become a global concern,” says NICD executive director Professor Adrian Puren.