US chief medical advisor Fauci stresses on need to understand 'profound risk' of monkeypox

The Biden administration's chief medical adviser Dr Anthony Fauci on Tuesday, July 26, warned that the government in the US as well as worldwide must understand the 'profound risk' of the spread of the monkeypox and must act immediately for the containment of the disease. Speaking at NPR's All Things Considered, Fauci stated that the Biden administration must focus on the early transmission of monkeypox, and emphasised that it is important to understand "the extent of the spread, how it's spread, what population."

The head of the United States' National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) propelled early warnings about the now fast-spreading disease, monkeypox, just a day after the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the disease as a ‘public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC)'.

People must outdo any 'homophobic stigma' linked to monkeypox: Fauci

Comparing monkeypox with the COVID-19 health emergency that turned into a deadly global pandemic, Fauci said that governments worldwide shall use the available tools to bring the monkeypox infection under control. He reiterated that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (US CDC) has been putting out the COVID-19 data that depicts that the daily hospitalisations due to COVID-19 have also spiked in the recent weeks. According to Fauci, monkeypox is posing a really "profound risk", especially at a time when the COVID-19 infections have also been peaking across several states in the US driven by the Omicron subvariants BA.5 and BA.4. The disease has already been detected among two children. 

Fauci, who has also helped battle diseases like HIV and AIDS,  suggested that people must outdo any homophobic stigma associated with monkeypox, and shall instead focus on the disease itself over the people that are infected with it. "You reach out to the community. You make it very easy for them to have access to testing, to treatment, and to vaccines, as opposed to making it a situation where people are afraid to come forward for those types of things," Fauci stressed. He advised that the modality of transmission must be understood, and that the disease also infects children and pregnant women. Currently, there are a 19,188 total confirmed cases of monkeypox, and 3,591 cases have been detected in the US alone, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data.