The two monkeypox cases which were recently recorded in Guyana are not related to each other according to Minister of Health, Dr Frank Anthony.
Anthony yesterday said that the two patients are still at the Infectious Diseases Hospital undergoing treatment.
In his daily update, the minister noted that the monkeypox virus is also being detected by a Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) test just as it is for COVID-19.
“We are able to confirm whether that person has monkeypox or not by doing a PCR test, and once we do that test, if the test is positive then we know that person had monkeypox, if it’s negative then that’s fine, the skin lesions might be from something else.”
“Over the past week since we’ve diagnosed our first case we’ve had many suspected cases but when we ran the laboratory test, it was not monkeypox. So we’ll encourage people to do this because that’s the only way we’ll know and we’d be able to confirm.”
The minister disclosed that in order to educate the public on the facts about monkeypox, a sensitisation workshop will be held on Friday for all media workers.
“The intention of it is to give people a very factual presentation on what is happening with monkeypox globally, what are the causes of monkeypox, how it’s transmitted, what are the clinical signs and symptoms and then some of the challenges one can have and how it can affect the programme if we have irresponsible reporting.”
The initial case which was reported on August 23 was a man in his fifties, and according to Anthony in the video while confirming the case, he stated that the man resided in the country and had no recent travel history. It was reported that the man was a taxi-driver.
The second case was reported on Monday and the victim is said to be in her thirties.
