Three Delhi govt hospitals directed to set up mpox rooms for suspected patients

The health department has directed three Delhi government hospitals to set up specific isolation rooms for suspected and confirmed mpox patients.

India has not reported any mpox cases so far during the current global outbreak of the disease.

“Three Delhi government hospitals — LNJP, GTB (Guru Teg Bahadur hospital) and Baba Saheb Ambedkar — have been directed to set up isolation rooms for suspected and confirmed cases of the disease. While LNJP (Lok Nayak Jai Prakash hospital) has been designated as the nodal facility, two other hospitals are on standby,” a senior health department official told Business Today.

Meanwhile, the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in New Delhi has reportedly issued a guideline to handle suspected mpox-infected patients.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is continuously monitoring the mpox situation.

As advised by the Prime MinisterNarendra Modi, Dr. P. K. Mishra, Principal Secretary to Prime Minister, chaired a high-level meeting recently to review the status of preparedness for Mpox in the country and related public health measures, an official statement said.

As per the present assessment, the risk of a large outbreak with sustained transmission is low, the Indian government said.

Meanwhile, a top official of the UN World Health Organization (WHO) said Mpox is “not the ‘new COVID’” and European governments need to show strong political commitment to eliminate it.

Briefing journalists in Geneva, Dr. Hans Kluge, WHO Regional Director for Europe, insisted that the risk from mpox to the general population was “low”.

He rejected comparisons between the fast-spreading viral disease which the agency declared an international public health emergency last week, and the COVID-19 pandemic, “regardless of whether it’s mpox clade 1, behind the ongoing outbreak in east-central Africa, or mpox clade 2, behind the 2022 outbreak that initially impacted Europe and has continued to circulate in Europe since”.

“We know how to control mpox – and in the European region – the steps needed to eliminate its transmission altogether,” Dr. Kluge continued.

Transmission pattern

Current scientific knowledge about the virus indicates that it primarily transmits through skin-to-skin contact with mpox lesions, including during sex. The UN health agency official’s reply to questions about whether Europe would experience COVID-like lockdowns was an unequivocal “no”.

Speaking via video link from Copenhagen, Dr. Kluge recalled that the 2022 European mpox outbreak was brought under control “thanks to the direct engagement with the most affected communities of men who have sex with men”.

He cited “behaviour change, non-discriminatory public health action and mpox vaccination” as factors of success in Europe in 2022. However, the region “failed to go the last mile” to quash the disease and is currently seeing some 100 new mpox clade 2 cases every month, he said.

Last week, Sweden became the first country outside Africa to record a case of the mpox clade 1 variant at the centre of the latest outbreak, which has been spreading from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to neighbouring countries. The Swedish case concerned a person who had travelled to an affected area of Africa.

The current state of alert due to clade 1, which is considered to be more severe, gives European health authorities the opportunity to also strengthen focus on clade 2 and eliminate it “once and for all,” Dr. Kluge urged.

Smallpox vaccines work

The UN health agency representative called specifically for European solidarity with Africa, notably regarding equitable access to vaccines.

WHO recommends the use of MVA-BN or LC16 vaccines, or the ACAM2000 vaccine when the others are not available. These have originally been developed against the now-eradicated disease smallpox.

WHO spokesperson Tarik Jašarević said that the producer of MVA-BN, Bavarian Nordic, “has capacity to manufacture 10 million doses by end of 2025 and can already supply up to two million doses this year”. As for LC16, which is a vaccine produced on behalf of the Government of Japan, he underscored that there is a “considerable” stockpile of this vaccine.

“Japan has been very generous in the past with donations” and is currently in negotiations with the DRC Government, he said.

The DRC has reported more than 15,600 mpox cases so far this year and some 540 deaths.