Israeli and Swiss officials on May 22 confirmed monkeypox cases as the World Health Organization has warned that the virus could accelerate during the summer months.
“This is a disease, not a pandemic,“ Israeli Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz wrote on Twitter. “This is a known disease with—usually—light symptoms that is not similar in any way to the coronavirus.”
He added that his agency is prepared to deal with the virus.
Horowitz didn’t give details about the Israeli case, but said the smallpox vaccine also can protect against monkeypox. The patient is a man in his 30s who had returned from a trip to western Europe, according to the Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center (Ichilov), where he’s been quarantined in mild condition.
In Switzerland, the person consulted a doctor because they had a fever and a rash and felt ill, officials said, adding that the person is in isolation at home and the illness is developing in a “benign” way. A person they had been in contact with has been informed, Swiss officials added.
So far, 80 monkeypox cases have been reported in North America, Europe, and Australia, WHO says. The virus is common in West and Central Africa.
Hans Kluge, WHO’s regional director for Europe, told news outlets over the weekend that cases could increase in a dramatic way.
Weighing in on the rise in cases, President Joe Biden said on May 22 that Americans should be concerned about the virus, although he admitted that his advisers “haven’t told me the level of exposure yet, but it is something that everybody should be concerned about.”
“We’re working on it hard to figure out what we do and what vaccine, if any, may be available for it,” he said.
“But it is a concern in the sense that if it were to spread, it’s consequential. That’s all they have told me.”
Monkeypox is mostly reported in Central and West Africa, where hundreds of cases are reported yearly. The monkeypox virus was first reported in laboratory monkeys in 1958, and the first human cases were found in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the early 1970s.
Symptoms of monkeypox—which is related to the smallpox virus—include fever, body aches, and rashes. Smallpox, which has been responsible for a number of pandemics throughout history, presents more severe symptoms.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said in a recent update regarding cases reported in the United Kingdom, that there was a “temporally clustered group of cases involving four people.”
“Some evidence suggests that cases among [homosexual males] may be epidemiologically linked; the patients in this cluster were identified at sexual health clinics,” the agency said. “This is an evolving investigation and public health authorities hope to learn more about routes of exposure in the coming days.”
