World News | Singapore Monitors 4 Diseases as Part of Pandemic Preparedness
Get latest articles and stories on World at LatestLY. Singapore government on Saturday said it is monitoring four diseases, including Covid-19, H5N1 and mpox, as part of its efforts to prepare the city-state for another possible pandemic.
Singapore, Dec 21 (PTI) Singapore government on Saturday said it is monitoring four diseases, including Covid-19, H5N1 and mpox, as part of its efforts to prepare the city-state for another possible pandemic.
In posts on his Facebook and Instagram accounts, Health Minister Ong Ye Kung said after the COVID-19 pandemic, health authorities are paying far more attention to risk of the next pandemic.
Ong said apart from COVID-19, the government is also monitoring H5N1 and mpox.
"The US just announced its first severe case, an elderly patient, in Louisiana. Of the 61 cases reported in the US so far, most had direct contact with animals -- birds, cattle -- which suggests animal to human transmissions. What we are keenly watching out for are evidence of human to human transmissions. If that happens, it may mean that H5N1 has mutated and poses a pandemic risk," he said.
Ong said that health authorities are also keeping a close watch on developments in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where a mysterious disease has killed 6 per cent of patients, mostly children.
According to the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 592 have been infected and at least 37 have died as a result of the disease.
Singapore has decided to donate surveillance equipment to the African CDC, the minister said.
He said the DRC health authorities have announced that the cases could be due to severe malaria, coupled with malnutrition amongst children, which made it deadly. As malaria is common in that area, further tests are needed to exclude the possibility of other causative diseases.
Ong said mpox clade 1 continues to wreak havoc in certain parts of Africa. There have been sporadic imported cases in places like Thailand, UK, Europe and US. Most recently there was a cluster of four cases in Germany, where a traveller to Africa infected his family members.
"It will be a matter of time when Singapore experiences our first imported case and even first local infection," he said.
The minister said the current dominant strain of Covid-19 in Singapore is MV.1.
"This descendant of the Omicron variant accounts for about 30 percent of local infections here. What is significant is that there has been no year-end wave as we expected... Wastewater testing and random tests did not point to an increase in cases. A possible reason is that over time, as more people get infected at different times, the infection waves become attenuated.
"Notwithstanding, some countries continue to experience waves, and MOH continues to watch out for the emergence of Covid-19 infection waves because each time it happens, it increases patient load at our hospitals significantly,” he said.
(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)