The United States government will not renew the health emergency decreed in August due to monpoxor when it expires on January 31, given the sharp decline in cases and the increase in vaccination among the population.
In a note, the US Secretary of Health and Human Services, Xavier Becerra, announced that the emergency will not be renewed after monkeypox has infected an estimated 30,000 people in the country and claimed the lives of 15 of them.
Weekly cases of monkeypox, which this week has been renamed “mpox” since World Health Organization (WHO), they are already 90% less than at the peak of the disease in the middle of this year, said the head of the organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
“Infections continue to fall, with only 620 registered this week” This was underlined at the press conference by the head of the WHO, who underlined that a large part of the new cases are detected in Latin America.
In this year’s epidemic, declared an international health emergency by the WHO, more than 81,000 cases (of which 59 were fatal) were confirmed in more than one hundred countries, the most affected were the USA (29,000 positive), Brazil ( 10,000), Spain (7,400), France (4,100) and Colombia (3,800).
WHO announced on Monday it would refer to the disease as “mpox” to try to avoid racist or stigmatizing comments. in relation to the disease such as those that have been circulating on the Internet this year.
However, the agency agreed to continue recognizing the term “monkeypox” as a synonym for a year.
