Mpox risk to Europe “low” says EU official, but virus and bird flu need monitoring

Ole Heuer, the newly appointed head of unit disease programmes at the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control talks to The BMJ about mpox, bird flu, antimicrobial resistance, and pandemic preparedness We at the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) are working closely with the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) and other international organisations to help in the best ways we can and give our support to prevent further spread of the infection. As we look at it from the European perspective, our assessment is that the risk to Europe is low. The conditions for further spread of the virus—in the form we know it now—are not good from the virus’s perspective. We believe that it will be possible to contain it if more people become infected. There’s already awareness of the disease in Europe. The effort that was carried out in EU member states in 2022-23 means that this isn’t a completely new situation. States are well prepared and there’s good reason to believe that cases will be found, treated, and confined—so the …