Ministry of Health and Medical Services and WHO collaborating to address Monkeypox virus preparedness and response arrangements.

The Ministry of Health and Medical Services is working in collaboration with the World Health Organization (WHO) country office in Solomon Islands to monitor and develop a preparedness plan for mpox. This is noting the current multi-country outbreak of mpox declared by the WHO Director-General as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC). Dr Tedros’s declaration came on the advice of an IHR Emergency Committee of independent experts, who consider the upsurge of mpox in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and a growing number of countries in Africa to have a potential to spread further across countries in Africa and possibly outside the continent.

Outbreaks of mpox have been reported in DRC for decades, but the number reported in the first six months of this year alone matches the total from last year. The current outbreak is caused by a new offshoot of clade I, called clade Ib which is spreading between people through sexual transmission and other types of contact. Clade Ib has been confirmed in DRC, Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, and Uganda. Clade I is known to cause more severe disease than clade II, which was responsible for the global outbreak that began in 2022.

There have been no cases of clade Ib in the Pacific or in neighboring countries. As of 23 August 2024, Australia reported 366 cases of clade II and New Zealand 53 cases of clade II since the initial outbreak in 2022. In the Pacific Island countries and areas, there have been no reported cases of clade II this year. Guam and New Caledonia both reported one imported case each of clade II in 2022.

Mpox is a viral infection which can spread between people, mainly through close contact, and occasionally from contaminated materials and surfaces that have been touched by a person with mpox. In settings where the monkeypox virus is present among some wild animals, it can also be transmitted from infected animals to people who have contact with them.

While more research is needed on how mpox spreads during outbreaks in different settings and under different conditions, the disease spreads from person to person mainly through close contact. It spreads from person-to-person, through sexual contact, touch, kissing, or close face-to-face contact with someone that has mpox, from infected animals, when hunting, skinning, or cooking them, from contaminated materials, such as sheets, towels, clothes, or needles, during pregnancy, when the virus may be passed onto the unborn baby.   People with mpox are considered infectious until all their lesions have crusted over, the scabs have fallen off and a new layer of healthy skin has formed underneath, which usually takes from 2 to 4 weeks.

Those infected with mpox or mpox will typically experience a fever, intense headache, muscle aches, back pain, low energy, swollen lymph nodes and a skin rash or lesions.  The rash usually begins within one to three days of the start of a fever. In most cases, symptoms will go away within weeks, with medication to support care for pain or fever. Nevertheless, in some individuals, infection from mpox can lead to medical complications and in a small proportion of cases even to death, depending on the health system’s capacity to respond timely.

Those mostly at risk of falling sick and dying from mpox are newborns, children, and people with weak immune system especially those with underlying health conditions and people living with HIV and AIDS.

As part of its preparation to prevent imported mpox cases in Solomon Islands, the Ministry of Health and Medical Services is assessing possible measures for international travelers.

The Ministry of Health and Medical Services takes action to ensure that enhanced surveillance is established to detect people with symptoms of mpox to enable laboratory testing either in-country, procuring laboratory reagents for detection of mpox cases or through established laboratory networks regionally. The Ministry of Health and Medical Services and partners will look into updating clinical management guidelines with recent evidence shared by WHO and conducting health awareness on mpox for the general population.