Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO Emergency Health Program, is believed to be present.
One potential course of action to be raised would be whether the smallpox vaccine produced by Bavarian Nordic, known as Jynneos in the United States and Imvanex in the United Kingdom, should be used to contact people for whom it is known to be infected.
The vaccine is only approved in the United Kingdom for protection against smallpox – although the virus has been eliminated since 1980 – but can be used “out of license” for protection against smallpox.
The data show that the vaccine, which is the only non-replicated virus in the world for smallpox or monkeypox, reduces the risk of human disease by 85 percent.
If a person is injected within four days of infection, the vaccine may change the course of the infection and improve their prognosis.
There are growing concerns about the outbreak, which accounts for at least nine cases in the UK and has been observed in various other countries. Health teams are deployed around the world to isolate and contact traces of affected people, and gays and bisexual men are urged to pay special attention to any new rashes or lesions on their body, especially the genitals.
Six of the nine confirmed cases in the UK were found among men who had sex with other men.
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