After weeks of growing alarm on urban households in progress yellow fever in Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo, an emergency committee convened by the World health Organization (WHO) has lowered the ground a bit today. He called the outbreak "a public health serious event," but because the international spread of the disease has slowed and vaccine stocks are recovering, the committee stopped short of declaring an "international scope of emergency public health "(PHEIC). This label would have given WHO recommendations more power. (The organization said PHEIC four times :. For H1N1, the resurgence of polio, Ebola epidemic in West Africa, and more recently the Zika virus)
"I think it was the right decision, "said Duane Gubler, an infectious disease specialist, who recently retired from the school of medicine Duke-NUS in Singapore. "However, the threat is there and needs to be recognized, not ignored as we usually do."
Yellow fever is caused by a virus that spreads through Aedes aegypti , the same mosquito that transmits Zika. Isolated human cases usually occur in or near the jungle where monkeys are a reservoir of the pathogen. When the virus enters the mosquito population of a big city, however, it can cause devastating outbreaks. What happened in December of last year in Luanda, capital of Angola and home to at least 8 million people. In the country as a whole, 2267 suspected cases of yellow fever have been reported, with at least 293 dead.
"urban yellow fever is a particularly dangerous situation and on because of the ability to spread rapidly," Bruce Aylward, director of Cluster outbreaks and health emergencies to WHO said at a press conference in Geneva, Switzerland, today. Indeed, the epidemic appears to have spread to Kinshasa, another African capital with millions of inhabitants. And travelers infected in Angola have also been reported in Kenya and China
The President of the WHO emergency committee, Nigerian virologist Oyewale Tomori, said that affected countries need to be absolutely sure that visitors are vaccinated against the virus. . He added that monitoring should be intensified, organized mass vaccination, and improved risk communication.
But the crisis has slowed down a bit. Although an emergency stockpile of 6 million doses of vaccine against yellow fever was used earlier this year in the fight against the Angolan outbreak, the production is there water supplies, Aylward said. "Currently, we expect that by the end of May the reserve will be about 7 million doses." Several million doses should be available in the coming months.
Even if the vaccine works to new low, some scientists have argued that the current could be divided doses to vaccinate two or even five people instead of one each. It is unclear how long protection will persist or even by which the factor to divide the doses. "Right now there are gaps in scientific knowledge," acknowledged Aylward. But Jack Woodall, a virologist retired in London who worked in the centers of control and disease prevention and WHO believes lower doses should be used immediately. "They always talk about the future and in the meantime, if the vaccine is used up," he said. "As long as the epidemic continues, the risk is high."
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