Quebec has confirmed 10 more cases of monkeypox, for a total of 15 cases across the province, the provincial health ministry said on Tuesday.
Last week, the province announced the first cases of the virus in Canada, after authorities there said they were investigating 17 alleged cases.
Health Ministry spokesman Robert Maranda says Quebec is considering ordering vaccines against the disease from the federal government.
Monkeypox, which is found mostly in West and Central Africa, is a rare viral infection similar to human measles, although milder. It was first recorded in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the 1970s. The number of cases in West Africa has increased over the last decade.
Nearly 20 non-endemic countries have reported recent outbreaks of the virus, with more than 230 confirmed or suspected infections, mostly in Europe.
Canada’s chief public health official said on Friday that authorities were investigating “several dozen” possible cases of monkeypox, most of them from Quebec.
Dr Theresa Tam said the Winnipeg National Microbiology Laboratory was also conducting tests on samples from British Columbia
“We don’t really know the extent of the spread in Canada. So this is an active investigation,” Tam said on Friday. “What we do know is that not many of these people are involved in traveling to Africa, where the disease is common.”
There, he said the overall risk to the population was “low” at the moment, but researchers are now working to determine why smallpox appears to be circulating in Canada and elsewhere in the Western world.
Supporting situation: WHO
The World Health Organization (WHO) says there is no evidence that the monkeypox virus has mutated.
On Monday morning, Dr. Rosamund Lewis, head of the Smallpox Secretariat, which is part of the WHO Emergency Program, said in a briefing that mutations are usually lower in the monkeypox virus.
She says genomic sequencing of cases will help understand the current epidemic.
Most of the more than 100 suspected and confirmed cases of a recent outbreak in Europe and North America were not serious, said Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO’s leader on emerging diseases and zoonoses and COVID-19 technical director.
“This is a manageable situation,” she said, especially in Europe. “But we can’t take our eyes off what is happening in Africa, in countries where it is endemic.”
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