Human Monkeypox Re-emerges While the World is Healing from the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Systematic Review

Contex:

While the world is still struggling with the COVID-19 pandemic, the newly emerging viral disease, monkeypox, first broke out in the United Kingdom on April 29th, 2022, amid the coronavirus crisis. Now that routine human smallpox vaccination has ended and herd immunity is waning, new assessments about monkeypox are needed.

Evidence Acquisition: 

In this systematic review, the epidemiological characteristics and clinical features of monkeypox disease were investigated. Persian articles were searched and retrieved using the keywords monkeypox, epidemic, COVID-19, an emerging infection in Magiran, Iran Medex, SID, and Irandoc databases, and so were the English articles using the same keywords in PubMed, Google Scholar, Science Direct, Scopus, Web of Science databases without time limit. In the end, 343 articles were selected and used in this study.

From the review of the studies, it was concluded that although cases of this disease have been reported in many non-endemic countries of the world, and we should be prepared for its prevention and proper treatment, considering its slower transmission method it seems that this disease can be controlled and prevented much more easily than COVID-19.

although it is recommended that the proper and complete training of people and doctors regarding the symptoms and transmission of this disease by the relevant institutions should be initiated quickly, one should be careful that raising the awareness of the public about this disease is accompanied by fear and panic. There is a need for a cautious teaching method, by following health principles.