The WHO Regional Office for Europe and the European Commission (EC) have confirmed their joint efforts to prevent monkeypox, which threatens to become endemic in Europe, according to a communiqué published in Brussels on Tuesday.
“We are witnessing an unprecedented spread of monkeypox orthopoxvirus in our region and around the world,” said Hans Kluge, Director of the WHO European Office, and Stella Kyriakidis, EC Health Member, in a joint statement on the occasion of the 72nd session of the WHO Regional Committee for Europe.
“This zoonotic virus, previously associated with only limited human-to-human spread in non-endemic countries, is now a global cross-border public health threat in Europe and an international public health emergency,” the document emphasizes.
The statement said that since the beginning of May 2022, more than 23,000 cases of monkeypox have been reported in the WHO European Region, of which more than 18,000 occur in the EU and the European Economic Area.
“The coordinated and collaborative response efforts of our European national and regional health agencies and authorities have been very important and we are now seeing a decline in cases in recent weeks. We believe the way to prevent the disease from becoming endemic in our region is to first fight against outbreaks and then working towards sustainable elimination of monkeypox in Europe, which means no sustained human-to-human transmission,” Kluge and Kyriakidis explain.
They pledged that the European Commission and WHO will continue to work together in consultation with Member States to “determine joint timelines, criteria and indicators to prevent the disease from becoming endemic in Europe.”
