THE World 午夜福利1000集合 Organization has finally sounded its most serious alarm over the spread of monkeypox, declaring it a 鈥減ublic health emergency of international concern鈥�, just as it did for covid-19 in 2020.
Many researchers think this decision should have been taken a month ago when the WHO first considered it. The disease is spreading rapidly around the world, with more than 16,000 cases confirmed so far this year (see Monkeypox has become a global health emergency, says WHO).
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But the real issue isn鈥檛 this delay. It is that we have had decades .
We have known monkeypox can jump to people since the 1970s. In particular, after an outbreak in Nigeria in 2017, there were warnings that human-to-human transmission seemed to be increasing.
Throughout this period, , but they haven鈥檛 been used. There has also been plenty of time to develop more effective treatments and vaccines specifically for monkeypox, but it didn鈥檛 happen.
Why? Because almost all the cases were in Black people in low-income countries in certain parts of Africa.
There is a moral imperative for richer nations to help tackle preventable diseases in poorer places. It is also in the self-interest of richer countries to do so, because infectious diseases don鈥檛 care about borders. An emerging disease anywhere has the potential to become a problem everywhere.
Having missed the opportunity to prevent this monkeypox outbreak in the first place, the response in many countries has also been inadequate. For instance, in the US there have been 鈥� much as there were with the coronavirus.
All this is alarming, not just because efforts to halt this outbreak appear to be failing. Sadly, it also suggests the world hasn鈥檛 learned much from the covid-19 pandemic, in particular the importance of acting early. There are other emerging diseases around the world. We need to do more to ensure they never go global.
