While Trinidad and To­ba­go has not re­port­ed cas­es of mon­key­pox, the dis­ease is now clos­er to the is­lands as Venezuela has de­tect­ed its first case of the rare dis­ease.

On Sun­day, Venezuela’s Min­istry of Health and So­cial De­vel­op­ment re­port­ed that it be­gan con­tact trac­ing af­ter de­tect­ing the dis­ease in a man who en­tered the coun­try through its Cara­cas air­port from Madrid, Spain.

At the Pan Amer­i­can Health Or­gan­i­sa­tion’s (PA­HO) week­ly me­dia brief­ing on COVID-19 in the Amer­i­c­as yes­ter­day, Di­rec­tor Dr Caris­sa Eti­enne said Venezuela was able to de­tect the case af­ter a train­ing pro­gramme for South Amer­i­can coun­tries last week. It in­clud­ed health per­son­nel from Bo­livia, Colom­bia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Pe­ru, Uruguay and Venezuela. Par­tic­i­pants re­ceived hands-on train­ing on re­al-time Poly­merase Chain Re­ac­tion and crit­i­cal sup­plies like primers and probes, en­abling them to car­ry out the tests in their home coun­tries.

“It is es­sen­tial to char­ac­terise the spread to dis­rupt the chains of trans­mis­sion and to stop an out­break. We have shared tech­ni­cal guid­ance for lab­o­ra­to­ries which were not fa­mil­iar with the virus. Last week, we car­ried out our first train­ing in Brazil, or­gan­ised with the coun­try’s Min­is­ter of Health, to strength­en the ca­pac­i­ty of na­tion­al lab­o­ra­to­ries,” Eti­enne said.

This week, PA­HO will car­ry out sim­i­lar train­ing in Kingston, Ja­maica, in­clud­ing per­son­nel from The Ba­hamas, Ja­maica, Guyana, St Lu­cia and Suri­name. PA­HO will al­so train per­son­nel from Cen­tral Amer­i­can coun­tries, Cu­ba and the Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic in Mex­i­co next week.

PA­HO guides the clin­i­cal man­age­ment of the dis­ease and ad­vice on tar­get­ed com­mu­ni­ca­tion strate­gies to pre­vent the spread among at-risk groups. Eti­enne said while PA­HO is in touch with vac­cine pro­duc­ers and their gov­ern­ments, a cur­rent risk as­sess­ment does not sug­gest mass vac­ci­na­tion at this time. She said vac­ci­na­tion is bet­ter suit­ed for spe­cif­ic groups like health­care and lab­o­ra­to­ry work­ers or close con­tacts of those in­fect­ed fol­low­ing ex­po­sure.

Eti­enne main­tained that the risk of mon­key­pox to the pub­lic re­mains low and coun­tries still have the op­por­tu­ni­ty to con­trol this out­break. She said PA­HO had ac­ti­vat­ed its Emer­gency Re­sponse Pro­ce­dure.

So far, PA­HO knows of 230 con­firmed cas­es in the re­gion, with the ma­jor­i­ty in the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca and Cana­da. Ar­genti­na, Brazil and Mex­i­co al­so de­tect­ed a few. Eti­enne said this num­ber will change as coun­tries de­tect more cas­es, but PA­HO’s pri­or­i­ty now is to sup­port the de­tec­tion of the virus.

CLICK FOR MORE NEWS