Health situation in Pakistan, COVID-19, monkeypox & Other Global Health Issues Virtual Press conference transcript - 31 August 2022
Overview
00:00:17
TJ Hello
to everyone from Geneva, from the headquarters of the World Health
Organization. My name is Tarik and today is August 31st. I’m happy to moderate
our regular WHO press briefing on global health issues. As always, we have a
simultaneous translation of this press briefing into six UN languages, and
Portuguese and Hindi.
I will start by introducing our experts
here, in the room, who will be talking to you. As always, with us is Dr Tedros,
WHO Director-General, Dr Ibrahima Socé Fall, who is Assistant Director-General
for Emergency Response. We have also Dr Soumya Swaminathan. She’s WHO Chief
Scientist. Dr Rosamund Lewis is a Technical Lead on monkeypox. We have also Dr
Maria Van Kerkhove, who is a Technical Lead on COVID-19.
Dr Rogério Gaspar is Director for
Regulation and Prequalification. Dr Kate O’Brien is Director for Immunisation,
Vaccines and Biologicals. Dr Bruce Aylward is also with us, and he’s Senior
Advisor to the Director-General. With us online, also we have Dr Sylvie Briand,
who is Director of the Epidemic and Pandemic Preparedness and Prevention Department
and she will also answer questions, if needed.
Journalists who are online, please click
the icon Raise Hand, so you will be put in a queue when we get to the question
and answer session. With this, I will give the floor to Dr Tedros for his
opening remarks. Dr Tedros.
00:02:05
TAG Thank
you. Thank you, Tarik. Good morning, good afternoon and good evening. First to
Pakistan, where weeks of heavy monsoon rains have caused extensive flooding and
landslides, resulting in death, displacement and damage. More than 1,000 deaths
have been reported and almost 900 health facilities have been damaged.
Three-quarters of Pakistan’s districts
and 33 million people have been affected, with more than six million in dire
need of humanitarian aid. Damage to health infrastructure, shortages of health
workers and limited health supplies are disrupting health services, leaving
children and pregnant and lactating women at increased risk.
Pakistan was already facing health
threats including COVID-19, cholera, typhoid, measles, leishmaniasis, HIV and
polio. Now, the flooding has led to new outbreaks of diarrhoeal diseases, skin
infections, respiratory tract infections, malaria, dengue, and more. In
addition, the loss of crops and livestock will have a significant impact on the
nutrition and health of many communities who depend on these resources.
And more rain is expected. Under our
internal grading system, WHO has classified the flooding in Pakistan as a grade
3 emergency, the highest level, which means all three levels of the organisation
are involved in the response: the country and regional offices, and
headquarters.
We are releasing US$10 million from the
WHO Contingency Fund for Emergencies, which is supporting our work to treat the
injured, deliver supplies to health facilities, and prevent the spread of
infectious diseases.
Floods in Pakistan, drought and famine in
the Greater Horn of Africa, and more frequent and intense cyclones in the
Pacific and Caribbean all point to the urgent need for action against the
existential threat of climate change.
00:04:58
Now to COVID-19, where we are now seeing
a welcome decline in reported deaths globally. However, with colder weather
approaching in the northern hemisphere, it’s reasonable to expect an increase
in hospitalisations and deaths in the coming months. Subvariants of Omicron are
more transmissible than their predecessors, and the risk of even more
transmissible and more dangerous variants remains.
Meanwhile, vaccination coverage among the
most at-risk people remains too low, especially in low-income countries. But
even in high-income countries, 30% of health workers and 20% of older people
remain unvaccinated. These vaccination gaps pose a risk to all of us, so please
get vaccinated if you are not and get a booster if it’s recommended that you
have one.
Even if you are vaccinated, there are
simple things you can do to reduce your own risk of infection and to reduce the
risk of infecting someone else. Avoid crowds if you can, especially indoors. If
you are in a crowded indoor space, wear a mask and open a window, and continue
to clean your hands, which will help to protect you and others from all kinds
of viruses and bacteria.
Living with COVID-19 doesn’t mean
pretending the pandemic is over. If you go walking in the rain without an
umbrella, pretending it’s not raining won’t help you. You’ll still get wet. Likewise,
pretending a deadly virus is not circulating is a huge risk.
00:07:19
Living with COVID-19 means taking simple
precautions to avoid getting infected or, if you are infected, from getting
seriously sick or dying. Once again, I am asking all governments to update
their policies to make best use of the life-saving tools that exist to manage
COVID-19 responsibly.
Finally, to monkeypox. In the Americas,
which accounts for more than half of reported cases, several countries continue
to see increasing numbers of infections, although it is encouraging to see a
sustained downward trend in Canada.
Some European countries, including
Germany and the Netherlands, are also seeing a clear slowing of the outbreak,
demonstrating the effectiveness of public health interventions and community
engagement to track infections and prevent transmission.
These signs confirm what we have said
consistently since the beginning, that with the right measures this is an
outbreak that can be stopped and, in regions that do not have animal-to-human
transmission, this is a virus that can be eliminated.
But it won’t just happen. Eliminating
monkeypox needs three things; the evidence that it’s possible, which we are now
beginning to see, political will and commitment, and the implementation of
public health measures in the communities that need them most.
We might be living with COVID-19 for the
foreseeable future but we don’t have to live with monkeypox. WHO will continue
to support all countries to stop this outbreak and eliminate this virus. Tarik,
back to you.
00:09:38
TJ Thank
you, Dr Tedros, for opening remarks. We will now open the floor to questions
from journalists and, again, please click the icon Raise Hand and we will come
to you. We will start with the first question. We have Helen Branswell, from
STAT. Helen, please go ahead.
HB Thank
you very much, Tarik. I have a question for Dr Fall. I was wondering if there’s
any update on the Ebola case in Beni. Particularly, I’m wondering if there’s
any indication of whether the [inaudible] had been vaccinated earlier in the 2018
outbreak there. Thank you.
TJ Dr
Fall.
SF Thank
you, Helen, for your question related to the Ebola outbreak in Beni. So far, we
have only recorded one case and now what we know is, from the sequencing, the
outbreak is linked to the 2018-2020 outbreak because we have had the same
family cases of outbreak, including the husband and the sister.
We have identified 172 contacts and
vaccination is ongoing but it is important to know that the risk of Ebola
outbreak is still important in North Kivu because of the ecological conditions,
the ecological niche, but we also have more than 1,000 people who survived the
disease, knowing that we can still have reactivation of the virus, emergence of
the disease.
00:11:32
We have a programme working very closely
with our Congolese colleagues and are working very closely with the community
to be able to activate a response programme whenever we have a new outbreak. We
still have a number of alerts because we are doing active case search. We have
identified more than 1,600 alerts and identified 180 situations where we needed
to take samples. All are negative but we are still very actively working in the
community to identify any new case. Thank you.
On vaccination, clearly we have
vaccination going on very actively and we have already vaccinated 118 contacts
and contacts of contacts. At this stage, the most important thing, after more
than 15 deaths, after the first case, is really to make sure that contacts of
contacts are vaccinated to avoid any secondary cases. We have an important
stock of vaccine at global level using the ICG mechanism. We have over 400,000
doses still available, so ICG is a very effective mechanism to rapidly allocate
and send vaccine to the country. Thank you.
TJ Thank
you, Dr Fall. We will now go to Simon Ateba, from Today News Africa. Simon.
SA Thank
you, Tarik, for taking my question. This is Simon Ateba, with Today News Africa
in Washington. First, can you please address the allegation that UN agencies,
including the WHO, the WFP and others are not helping doctors in Tigray, for
instance denying them fuel to power their generators to treat patients?
Also, can you give us an update on the
funding you’ve been trying to raise to tackle hunger in the Horn of Africa? How
do you go about it? Do you approach countries like the US or do you go directly
to rich folks like Zuckerberg, Musk, Bezos? The amount is not too much since
that is what is used to feed cats in the US for one day. Thank you.
00:13:52
TJ Thank
you, Simon. Maybe, Dr Fall.
SF Thank
you. I’m not clear about the first question on Tigray. The UN denying fuel to
who? I’m not sure. This is a bit unclear but I’m not aware of any action of the
UN trying to block anything. Our work is to save life and we work very closely
with health workers, local health workers, local health authorities as WHO to
make sure that we provide the necessary health intervention, although it’s very
limited because of the issue of access, the issue of access to fuel and so on.
So, we are still very limited because of the security situation, of course.
In terms of resource mobilisation for the
Horn of Africa and for other crises, we have a mechanism with our team working
on resource mobilisation to alert donors and to brief them on the situation and
the risk and to present the needs we have. We talked about 124 million for the
Horn of Africa and we started responding using the WHO Contingency Fund for
Emergencies, with 16.5 million.
So far, we are not receiving the support
we need to save life and, as we always say, a nutrition crisis is already a
health crisis because people who are malnourished are more likely to get
disease and more likely to have a negative outcome from disease. At the same
time, people who are sick are more likely to get malnutrition.
00:15:29
So, the situation is really bad. The
combination of malnutrition and disease outbreaks like cholera, measles,
meningitis, as we already said the combination is killing a lot of people and
we need to act now but we are not getting the funds we need to act on. This is
a cross-sector response. It’s not only about health or only about nutrition. We
need to act from all sides to be able to save lives.
TJ Thank
you, Dr Fall. If any of your questions have not been fully answered, Simon,
please contact us via email and we will be happy to assist. Let’s now go to
Lynne Peterson, from Trends-in-Medicine. Lynne, unmute yourself, please.
LP Hi.
Thank you. Have you learned any more about whether monkeypox can be transmitted
through blood or semen? We know that it can be detected in both but what have
you learned? What’s new about that? And, secondly, it has been characterised
mostly as a problem in the men who have sex with men community but men who have
sex with men include bisexual men, so doesn’t that mean that they sometimes have
sex with women, so therefore it could spread outside that community?
TJ Thank
you. Maybe, Dr Rosamund Lewis can take this question.
RL Thank
you very much. There have not been any reports so far of transmission of
monkeypox through blood transfusions. There have definitely been reports of the
detection of the monkeypox virus DNA in semen. One study did illustrate that
the virus could be isolated from that specimen.
However, other studies are still
underway. We’re still monitoring this space and still looking to understand it.
This is an area where we need to learn more. There’s a lot we don’t know and
monkeypox can be transmitted through the close contact that is involved in
sexual activity.
00:17:45
There may be a contribution from
infection through contact with semen, itself, but we don’t fully know the
answers to this question yet, so protecting oneself involves the actions we’ve
been talking about from the beginning, which is reducing physical contact with
anyone who has monkeypox, reducing number of sexual partners, reducing casual
sex or new partners and being more open about one’s risks and having
conversations with others that may highlight mutual protection and protection
of each other.
These are the important features. As long
as we don’t have the answers to these questions, the actions to protect oneself
remain critically important and some agencies, including WHO, are recommending
the use of condoms. That is, in part, as a precautionary measure because we
don’t know how much of the infection is transmitted through semen but it is
also because it does reduce skin-to-skin contact.
It’s preferable to avoid skin-to-skin
contact altogether if someone has monkeypox but at the very least using a
condom may reduce that risk while we do more studies to learn more information.
00:19:01
This applies, as you highlight, to
bisexual and gay men who have sex with men and anyone who has multiple sexual
partners. This is not a disease that is limited specifically to a specific
group. What is happening is that it is being spread primarily in one risk
group. We know that the majority of cases are occurring among men who are gay
or bisexual, as they report themselves when their cases are reported to WHO.
However, as you point out, physical
contact of any kind with anyone who has monkeypox would put someone at risk. We
are seeing a few cases of women and others who may have acquired monkeypox
through a different route of infection, different mode of transmission, but the
vast majority today are still among men who have sex with men, whether they be
gay, bisexual or otherwise have contact with other men who have monkeypox.
So, the actions remain the same. Protect
yourself, protect each other, access to testing and vaccine where it’s
available and reduction of, of course, any discrimination or stigma, because
that prevents people from accessing care. Thanks.
TJ Thank
you, Dr Lewis. Today’s press briefing is going to be shorter than usual, so we
will conclude, with this, today’s briefing. We will have audio and video files
sent to our global list later today and then we will have a press briefing
transcript available on our website tomorrow. With this, I’ll give the floor to
Dr Tedros for his closing remarks. Dr Tedros.
TAG Thank
you. Thank you, Tarik. Thank you to all members of the press who have joined us
today and see you next time.