UK given ‘two weeks’ as lethal Mpox pressure might be already in UK
Health officials warn that a new highly dangerous strain of the Mpox virus might be closer to home than we initially thought.
Paul Hunter, Professor of Medicine at the University of East Anglia, warned the strain could already be on UK shores and could start spreading within two weeks. The World Health Organisation recently declared a “public health emergency of international concern.”
The virus underwent a deadly surge in Africa, with a spike resulting in over 13,500 cases and 450 deaths in the Democratic Republic of Congo since the beginning of the year.
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Scientists have now discovered a more severe strain which caused the deaths named Clade 1 was detected in Sweden. There are two types of Clade 1 and the Swedish case has been identified as Clade 1b, reports the Mirror.
Hunter told the Mirror the strain “may well be here” already due to a delay in the testing and diagnosis. Dr Hunter said: “If I was to bet, I’d bet on it already being in the country, because by the time you get infected and diagnosed to understand what Clade it is, you’re looking at around two weeks.”
(Image: BSIP/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
“If you turn up to an STD clinic with symptoms of Mpox, the physician that sees you will have no way of being able to tell what Clade it is, because they all look the same,” he explained. “You get infected, a week later, you get ill enough to go to the clinic, a sample gets taken – and it’s shown to be Monkeypox, and then it’s sequenced to see what Clade it is. That whole process can take up to two weeks.”
He continued: “As of two weeks ago, we probably didn’t have any cases, but my guess is that we probably will hear about [new cases emerging] over the next one or two weeks.”
Dr Hunter said: “In Covid, once a new variant appeared, it would either flutter along for a little while and die out, or it would overtake and become the dominant variant by large. Often, one will dominate and drive out the other one.I suspect it will be a pandemic.”
(Image: Getty Images)
While the UK’s 2022 Mpox outbreak was predominately spread through sexual contact, the disease can still be transmitted in other ways. Dr Hunter says communities who were affected in the last outbreak may be impacted again this time, and warned transmission through sexual contact can spread like wildfire.
He added: “The 2022 pandemic was predominately sexually transmitted. That doesn’t mean every case was sexually transmitted, and there were some infections spread within families outside of sexual contact – but the thing about sexual transmission, is that it spreads around the world really damn quickly.”
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