Top Chinese epidemiologist Wu Zunyou has revised his advisory about monkeypox prevention after his earlier comments came under fire for being “racist and discriminatory”.
On his Weibo account on Saturday, Wu urged people to avoid “direct skin-to-skin contact” with foreigners or recent returnees from abroad to avoid contracting the disease.
The comments drew criticism on Chinese social media where his advice was ridiculed as racist and inappropriate.
The advisory came a day after China reported its first monkeypox case – a patient who had flown into Chongqing from Germany and was in quarantine when he was diagnosed.
Wu amended his advice on Monday, asking people to avoid “intimate direct skin-to-skin contact” with foreigners or returnees from countries and regions where monkeypox outbreaks had been reported.
In his latest post, Wu also played down the risk of monkeypox spreading in China, saying there were no domestic cases and the spread of the disease outside the country appeared to be abating.
Wu said the United States, Britain, France, Spain, Brazil, and other countries had reported a rapid rise in monkeypox cases from May, but the possibility of such an epidemic in mainland China was very slim.
“As the spread [of monkeypox] in the two high-risk areas – America and Europe – subsides, the pressure on us to prevent the import of cases into mainland China has been reduced,” Wu wrote.
The Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention said the patient was a 29-year-old Chinese salesman who had had sex with men during a trip to Germany in early September. He later travelled to Spain before he returned to Chongqing on Wednesday.
Gene sequencing showed the virus strain in his case belonged to the B.1 branch of the West African lineage, and was “highly homologous”, or similar, to strains from Germany collected on June 21.
The World Health Organization declared the monkeypox outbreak a public health emergency of international concern on July 23.