RISHARD KHAN
rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt

The Min­istry of Health con­vened an emer­gency meet­ing with health ex­perts to dis­cuss the re­cent out­break of mon­key­pox, which now has at least 100 cas­es in around sev­en coun­tries.

Speak­ing to re­porters af­ter get­ting his sec­ond COVID-19 boost­er, Min­is­ter of Health Ter­rence Deyals­ingh said he was at the meet­ing be­fore vis­it­ing the vac­ci­na­tion site. He said a de­tailed re­lease on the mat­ter will be pub­lished by 3 pm on Fri­day.

"We are very con­cerned about it, and we are not tak­ing it light­ly," he said.

In at­ten­dance at the emer­gency meet­ing were rep­re­sen­ta­tives from the Pan Amer­i­can Health Or­gan­i­sa­tion (PA­HO), Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer (CMO) Dr Roshan Paras­ram, Epi­demi­ol­o­gy Di­vi­sion Tech­ni­cal Di­rec­tor Dr Av­ery Hinds, Prin­ci­pal Med­ical Of­fi­cer of In­sti­tu­tions Dr Maryam Ab­dool-Richards, and Man­ag­er of the Ex­tend­ed Pro­gramme on Im­mu­ni­sa­tion nurse Grace Sookc­hand.

The Min­is­ter of Health said he al­so met with the Caribbean Pub­lic Health Agency (CARPHA) pri­or to the meet­ing.

Ac­cord­ing to in­ter­na­tion­al re­ports, a small num­ber of cas­es have been de­tect­ed in coun­tries such as the Unit­ed States, the Unit­ed King­dom, Por­tu­gal, Spain, Italy and France.

What is Mon­key­pox?

Ac­cord­ing to the Cen­tres for Dis­ease Con­trol and Pre­ven­tion (CDC), mon­key­pox is a rare dis­ease that is caused by in­fec­tion with the mon­key­pox virus. the CDC says the con­di­tion re­sem­bles small­pox ex­cept with milder symp­toms. It is pri­mar­i­ly spread when a per­son comes in­to con­tact with the virus from an an­i­mal, hu­man, or ma­te­ri­als con­t­a­m­i­nat­ed with the virus.

Mon­key­pox's in­cu­ba­tion pe­ri­od is usu­al­ly 7−14 days but can range from 5−21 days, the CDC said.

Symp­tom on­set be­gins with fever, headache, mus­cle aches, and ex­haus­tion. The main dif­fer­ence be­tween the symp­toms of small­pox and mon­key­pox is that mon­key­pox caus­es lymph nodes to swell (lym­phadenopa­thy) while small­pox does not.

With­in three days of fever on­set, an in­fect­ed per­son de­vel­ops a rash, of­ten be­gin­ning on the face, be­fore spread­ing to oth­er parts of the body. Symp­toms typ­i­cal­ly last two to four weeks.

"In Africa, mon­key­pox has been shown to cause death in as many as 1 in 10 per­sons who con­tract the dis­ease," the CDC said.