Marcos orders continuous surveillance on Mpox

MANILA, Philippines — President Marcos has directed agencies to sustain monitoring of areas and people most vulnerable to mpox, which has been declared by the World Health Organization (WHO) as a global public health emergency.

Marcos met with officials of the Department of Health (DOH) on Tuesday to discuss the viral disease, which can be transmitted through close or intimate contact with an infected person or through contaminated objects.

“Continue surveillance, especially on areas and people most vulnerable to the disease,” Marcos said.

The DOH yesterday clarified that there is no mpox epidemic similar to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Only 10 mpox cases were recorded for the past year. Mpox is curable and not highly infectious, the DOH said.

Health Secretary Teodoro Herbosa told Marcos that all patients have recovered from the non-airborne disease.

A state of public health emergency has not been declared due to the low number of mpox cases and fatality rate, Herbosa said.

He said the first mpox case reported in the Philippines this year is a mild variant and not the deadly strain sparking global alarm.

“It’s the old variant,” he said, referring to the mild Clade 2 variant. “It’s not as alarming as the Clade 1b.”

The highly transmissible Clade 1b strain of the virus has killed hundreds of people in the Democratic Republic of Congo and has also been detected in Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda and Sweden. This prompted the WHO to declare mpox a public health emergency of international concern.

Mpox has the potential to spread further across countries in Africa and possibly outside the continent, according to experts from the International Health Regulations Emergency Committee.

Common mpox symptoms include skin rashes or mucosal lesions, which can last for two to four weeks, the DOH said.

Rashes are accompanied by fever, headache, muscle aches, back pain, low energy and swollen lymph nodes, the DOH noted.

On Monday, the DOH detected the first mpox case this year – a 33-year-old Filipino male with no travel history outside the country, but with close, intimate contact three weeks before symptom onset.

“For us doctors, that means the virus is circulating in the