The Government of the United States will not renew the health emergency decreed in August for monkeypox when it expires on January 31, given the large drop in cases and the increase in vaccination among the population.
In a statement, the US Secretary of Health and Human Services, Xavier Becerra, announced that the emergency will not be renewed, after monkeypox has infected some 30,000 people in the country and caused the death of 15 of them.
The weekly cases of monkeypox, which this week has been renamed «mpox» by the World Health Organization (WHO), are already 90% less than at the peak of the disease in the middle of this year, indicated the head of the organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
«Contagions continue to drop, with only 620 registered this week,» said the head of the WHO at a press conference, who stressed that a good part of the new cases are being detected in Latin America.
In this year’s outbreak, which was declared an international health emergency by the WHO, more than 81,000 cases were confirmed (59 of them fatal) in more than a hundred countries, the most affected being the USA (29,000 positives), Brazil (10,000 ), Spain (7,400), France (4,100) and Colombia (3,800).
The WHO announced Monday that it would refer to the disease as «mpox» to try to avoid racist or stigmatizing comments about the disease like those that have circulated on the internet this year.
