As the World Health Organization's emergency committee convened Thursday to consider for the second time within weeks whether to declare monkeypox a global crisis, some scientists said the striking differences between the outbreaks in Africa and in developed countries will complicate any coordinated response.
African officials say they are already treating the continent's epidemic as an emergency. But experts elsewhere say the mild version of monkeypox in Europe, North America and beyond makes an emergency declaration unnecessary even if the virus can't be stopped. British officials recently downgraded their assessment of the disease, given its lack of severity.
Some experts worry these and other differences could possibly deepen existing medical inequities between poor and wealthy nations. "In these very active gay sexual networks, you have men who really, really don't want people to know what they're doing and may not themselves always know who they are having sex with," Hunter said.
"We see here very quickly, after three to four days, visible lesions in people exposed to monkeypox," Mbala said, adding that someone with so many visible lesions is unlikely to go out in public, thus preventing further transmission. Dr. Dimie Ogoina, a professor of medicine at Nigeria's Niger Delta University, said he feared the world's limited vaccine supplies would result in a repeat of the problems that arose in the coronavirus pandemic, when poorer countries were left empty-handed after rich countries hoarded most of the doses.
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