The outburst of Monkeypox cases over those last months has ignited the World Health Organization (WHO) to launch an International Health emergency on Saturday.
The now-alarming infection wasn’t initially on doctors’ radars when it first spread mostly because the outbreak concerned West African countries and symptoms that were quite common for many infectious diseases.
WHO spoke to several doctors to know more about their perspectives and experiences working with Monkeypox patients.
“At the beginning of May I had several patients presenting with what appeared to be ulcers. We tested them for sexually transmitted infections but everything came back negative, so we knew something was wrong,” Dr Francisco Silva, a General Practitioner in Lisbon explained in his interview with Reliefweb.
His clinic lab had to report the cases through the EpiPulse online platform run by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, to discover that they had their first cases of monkeypox.
Dr. Nesli Basgoz, a hospital Associate at Massachusetts General Hospital met her first Monkeypox patient in May. She first tested him for Chickenpox and syphilis but the tests were negative.
“One major reason is that the main strain associated with this outbreak is the West African clade, and that’s associated with milder disease,” she explained in her CNN interview
“The combination of not improving when the patient was treated for common things, the results of testing for common infections coming back negative, and some change in the appearance of the rash raised the possibility that this could be a pox virus,” Dr Basgoz added.
Doctors found in their experience that the cases they had did not necessarily have a rash that is considered a typical symptom of monkeypox.
They’ve noticed as well that patients were showing mild symptoms that could be mistaken for other illnesses.
Monkeypox has now reached more than 15,000 people in 75 countries as the outbreak continues to grow according to the WHO.
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