Brazilians are reportedly attacking monkeys by poisoning them in a misguided response to stop the spread of monkeypox.
People in Brazil have poisoned at least 10 monkeys, killing 7, local news site G1 reported. The incident has prompted an official response from the World Health Organization (WHO).
“What people need to know is that the transmission we are seeing is happening between humans,” a WHO spokesperson said on Tuesday.
A zoo in São Paulo is currently treating three primates who survived the poisonings, a mix of capuchins and marmosets. But anti-money attacks are on the rise all over Brazil, with law enforcement officials saying that some locals have also started stoning or shooting monkeys.
Meanwhile, Democrats in the U.S. are also brutalizing monkeys. Back in January, it was exposed that the Biden administration has been funding a project that injected male monkeys with female hormones.
This comes in light of the WHO declaring the monkeypox outbreak as a global emergency last month.
“We have an outbreak that has spread around the world rapidly through new modes of transmission about which we understand too little and which meets the criteria in the international health regulations,” said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 16,000 cases of monkeypox have been reported in 72 countries since about May, with deaths only being reported in Africa so far.
Symptoms appear one to two weeks after infection and initially include mostly flu-like symptoms such as fever, headaches, and shortness of breath. The WHO assured that monkeypox could be fatal for up to one-in-ten people only, and patients usually recover within two to four weeks without needing to be hospitalized.
95 percent of monkeypox cases have been transmitted through sexual activity, according to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Some have speculated that monkeypox might be on the verge of becoming an entrenched sexually transmitted disease in the U.S.
“There are some genetic mutations in the virus that suggest why that may be happening, but we do need a globally-coordinated response to get it under control,” said Dr. Albert Ko, a professor of public health and epidemiology at Yale University.
