Leading doctors are warning that President Donald Trump is potentially letting one of the world’s deadliest infections take hold in the US following his freeze on global health aid.
Dr Amesh Adalja, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg school of public health, told DailyMail.com that mpox – formerly known as monkeypox – could become a real global emergency in the wake of Trump’s drastic move.
In August 2024, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared mpox a ‘public health emergency of international concern’, following a surge in cases in the DRS and its neighboring countries.
The US government, up until now, has maintained partnerships in global health security and development with the DRC and throughout Africa, which have helped to combat infectious diseases, such as mpox, HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria for more than 20 years.
In 2023, for instance, the US allocated more than $2.65 billion in health funding to countries in Central and Eastern Africa and it was considered the largest global health donor.
But following Trump’s executive order to freeze almost all US foreign aid, health experts are waning that his actions could come back to bite.
Dr Adalja highlights that under Joe Biden, the US had pledged the donation of one million mpox vaccine doses and at least $500 million to African countries to support their response to the outbreak.
But with this support gone, he says there is a real risk of the disease rapidly spreading around the world.
Leading doctors are warning that President Donald Trump is potentially letting one of the world’s deadliest infections take hold in the US following his freeze on global health aid
Pictured: A file photo of rashes caused by monkeypox
He said: ‘In essence, the key to removing mpox as a threat to human health involves addressing it at its source.
‘It is only in recent months, that vaccination campaigns have begun in endemic countries with US support.
‘Disrupting this program will reverse those gains and make it harder to control the mpox transmission that is going on in endemic countries and the subsequent risk of disease importation to the US and other countries.’
Meanwhile Dr Stephen Morse, a professor of epidemiology at Columbia University, agrees that it’s a ‘real mistake that the US isn’t ‘doing everything we can to control this while we’re still able to’.
‘Taking huge steps backwards is only going to make everything worse,’ he told The Guardian.
Mpox is a viral infection that is transmitted via direct contact with sores or rashes on a patient, which often appear around the genital area.
Symptoms develop three to 17 days after infection, with signs including a fever, chills and a headache before the rash appears.
Patients are treated with Tecovirimat, or TPOXX, an antiviral that works by stopping the monkeypox virus from making copies of itself.
In severe cases, patients may have larger and more widespread rashes and lesions, especially on the mouth, eyes and genital areas.
The above map shows the states that have detected cases of clade Ib monkeypox
They may also start to suffer from secondary bacterial infections of the skin, blood or lungs, which can lead to encephalitis – swelling of the brain – and pneumonia.
To prevent infections, the US recommends avoiding direct skin-to-skin contact with people who have a rash that looks like monkeypox.
People are also advised not to use objects or materials that a monkeypox patient has used, and to wash hands after learning of monkeypox exposure during sex.
In 2022, the US also initiated a mass roll out of the JYNNEOS vaccine mostly to gay or bisexual men who had more than one sexual partner – which it said were at higher risk of infection.
In August last year, the WHO declared that clade I monkeypox was a global public health emergency and this month, a new strain of monkeypox was detected in the US, prompting alarm among health officials.
The New York State Department of Health confirmed that it had detected a case of clade Ib monkeypox, which also causes a rash on the hands, feet, chest face, mouth and/or genitals.
It is related to the more deadly clade I monkeypox, which kills three to 11 percent of patients it infects, but so far studies suggest that this strain has a fatality rate of less than one percent and causes a relatively mild illness.
It marked the fourth case to be detected in the US since November 15, after infections were also detected in California, Georgia and New Hampshire.
The US has been battling an outbreak of clade II monkeypox since 2022, which has so far sickened more than 34,000 people and led to 58 deaths.
So far this year, 39 people have been diagnosed with monkeypox. But there are concerns that clade I, which is deadlier, could also spread from central Africa to the US.
The hope is to speed up research and roll out vaccines to contain the virus, which is more infectious and several times deadlier than the one that caused the global outbreak in 2022.
Trump has signaled some willingness to backtrack on his withdrawal from the WHO, telling a rally in Las Vegas soon after signing the order that ‘we would consider doing it again, I don’t know… They would have to clean it up.’
Sources said it remains unclear whether the points in the proposal will come to fruition, and the administration has not formally announced that it will return to the organization any time soon.
As of now, the CDC is barred from communicating with the WHO, a sudden stoppage that public health authorities fear could set back work on containing outbreaks of Marburg virus, mpox, Ebola, bird flu, and other emerging global health threats.
The White House told Reuters that it will ‘continue to review current processes and healthcare bodies to implement needed reforms.’
