COMMUNICATING the risk of mpox to a wider audience will be the key to preventing the spread of the disease in the country, the Department of Health (DoH) said.
The DoH stressed the importance of informing more people about the threat of mpox as the country detected two more cases, one of them a 12-year-old male, so far the youngest to contract the disease.
There are now 14 confirmed mpox cases in the country, the DoH reported.
During a public briefing on Thursday, Health Assistant Secretary Albert Francis Domingo stressed the importance of communicating the risks of mpox to a wider audience while cases remain low.
Domingo compared the response of the government to a flashlight, where previously undetected cases will be exposed through an intensified information drive.
“That is what is happening today, we are not increasing cases, what we are seeing are previous cases, but our practice now is if the more virulent Clade 1b arrives here, we won’t get scared and get panicked,” Domingo said.
The cases all had was the MPXV DNA Clade 2 virus, a less virulent strain. But Domingo cautioned that it would only be a matter of time before the highly virulent Clade 1b will enter the country.
The DoH spokesman also warned that spreading fake information about mpox could create panic, as what happened at the Amang Rodriguez Memorial Medical Center in Marikina City.
“The previous weeks, there were social media posts about an mpox case in the hospital, which scared everyone but it was negative. Not all rashes have mpox, we have tests to know that, we will determine it first before we announce it,” Domingo said.
He said that a person who develops scabs or scars in the body, fever and other symptoms, may opt for online consultation and send pictures of the symptoms using cellphones to doctors before being tested for possible mpox symptoms.
“Once you get positive, you will be allowed to go home if you don’t have any other conditions, as the transmission is through skin to skin contact, you can go home with your lesions closed, and you can go home and stay for two to four weeks, and if you don’t have further symptoms, you are cleared. That is our protocol,” Domingo said.
He said home isolation for positive mpox cases is allowed as long as they do not have additional underlying conditions.
So far, three of the five active mpox cases that were confirmed over the past two weeks were recovering at home, while two are still in the hospital.
Domingo reiterated that mpox is different from Covid-19, since it is transmitted through close skin to skin contact.
The DoH also said there has been a “small yet significant change” in the questions of the Bureau of Quarantine in the E-Travel website, as arriving visitors are now required to answer whether they have “rashes, vesicles or blisters” in the past 30 days.
“If by the electronic form, a traveler is determined to be from a country listed by WHO (World Health Organization) as an outbreak area, or they have a history of exposure to an mpox case, or they have any signs/symptoms, the etravel.gov.ph system will alert the Bureau of Immigration (BI) and the DoH Bureau of Quarantine (BoQ),” the DoH said.
The passenger will be referred by the BI or BoQ for secondary screening, and if the traveler is a suspected case, he or she would be admitted to an mpox referral hospital.
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