The Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) says the recent worry does not merit a ‘plot’ for another lockdown, dismissing such rumours as untrue.
This was disclosed by Ifedayo Adetifa, NCDC director-general onTuesday at an online media dialogue on monkeypox spread, infodemic and public health response in Nigeria.
Adetifa harped on the continued transparency of the NCDC in the reporting of information around diseases under it’s purview, adding that the agency has consistently published such information over the past five years.
“Despite that, we still have some disinformation on monkeypox especially since the appearance of cases in non-endemic countries this year,” he said.
“Monkeypox is not a plot by anybody to cause a lockdown or to disrupt our lives as we saw with COVID-19.“SARS-COV2, the virus that causes COVID-19, was a novel pathogen. We didn’t know anything about it and we had to learn and constitute efforts to curb it.
“However, monkeypox is not a novel disease; it has been around. The virus itself was identified for the first time in 1958 and the first human cases were identified in 1970 and 1971.
“So far, based on the information we have from our cases in Nigeria, we’ve not seen any change in transmissibility of the virus or in its clinical manifestation.
“We continue to work hard to gain some insight into the areas that we do not have enough data on such as which animals are reservoirs of this virus.”
