“It’s not likely to generate a major transmission, but we can’t rule it out.” The director of the Coordination Center for Health Alerts and Emergencies, Fernando Simón, assessed this Wednesday the existence of up to eight suspected cases of monkeypox in Spain, after the alert issued by the Ministry of Health to the autonomous communities before the appearance of this zoonotic infection.
“It is not likely that it will generate a significant transmission, but we cannot rule it out,” said the former visible face and spokesman for the Government of Spain in the fight against the coronavirus. Simón, during the celebration of the 1st International Summit on Pandemic Management held in Valencia, confirmed that epidemiological experts “work with all the hypotheses”, although “it is clear that we must be very careful”.
In this regard, he clarified that the suspected cases of monkeypox in Spain have not yet been confirmed, as has happened in the United Kingdom and Portugal. At the moment, the infections are being analyzed at the National Center for Microbiology. As explained by Simón, “this infectious disease until now was limited to the African continent”, so “it is most likely that the origin is a specific case that came from this territory.
“It is spread from monkeys to humans, since there is very little transmission between people,” said the director of the Center for Health Alerts and Emergencies. However, he has highlighted that “until a few years ago the outbreaks did not have more than a second generation of transmission, but in recent times up to third and fourth generations have been detected.”
2
