The state of Rio de Janeiro will open four testing posts for suspected cases of monkeypox over the next few days. The first of them will open on Friday afternoon (19) at Iaserj Maracanã, in the North Zone.
The municipality of São Gonçalo will offer the service as of Tuesday, 23, at a point attached to the Colubandê UPA. Still next week, the testing post in Nova Iguaçu will start operating, which will be located at the Vasco Barcelos Health Center.
The Center for Combating and Studying Emerging and Reemerging Infectious Diseases, from UFRJ, will also host a post, but the Secretary of State for Health (SES) of Rio has not yet informed when it begins to operate.
THE CNN Radio the Secretary of State for Health, Alexandre Chieppe, explained that after collected, the samples will go to the two reference laboratories in the state. The results must come out between 24 and 48 hours.
“The posts aim to facilitate access to the diagnosis of suspected cases to initiate disease control actions.”
“People were having a really hard time knowing where they were going to test themselves,” explains Chieppe. According to him, the laboratories in Rio are ready to receive the new demand for tests. Now, the focus of the secretariat is to expand the collection points for the material.
The referral of suspected cases to testing points needs to be done by a unit of the public network. The patient must return to the health unit where he was treated to receive the test result.
Alexandre Chieppe, defends the state of public health emergency. “When we think about declaring a state of emergency, we have to take into account that this can facilitate the entry of important inputs to control the disease, whether new diagnostic tests or vaccines that may be available,” he argued.
For now, the state’s perspective is to receive few doses of the immunizing agent, which should be applied to the most vulnerable groups, says Chieppe. But the strategy for vaccination against smallpox has not yet been defined.
*Under the supervision of Joyce Murasaki of CNN
Source: CNN Brasil
