An 18-member panel has recommended that adults at risk of contracting mpox should be vaccinated as a precaution.
The Centers for Disease and Control still needs to decide whether or not the agency will accept the recommendation, but if it does, adults over the age of 18 would be advised to get vaccinated.
"The recent outbreak has highlighted again the risks that infectious diseases can present to our communities, the importance of a robust public health response at the state and local level, the value of engaged partners and communities in responding to public health threats and the impact that a vaccine can have in helping bring an outbreak under control," Dr. Melinda Wharton, the CDC associate director for vaccine policy, told CNN.
The vote comes after an mpox outbreak swept the U.S. in the summer of 2022 and popped up in other countries where no cases had been reported for decades.
The Jynneos mpox vaccine, which is a two-dose treatment, has an efficacy rate of 83 percent and was approved for emergency use in August when nearly 450 new cases were being reported daily. The highest reported cases were among sexually active gay and bisexual men.
While the amount of daily reported cases has dwindled drastically since the previous summer — down to just two per day — it is still higher than what the U.S. reported in recent years.
"We do not think that this outbreak is over, and that's very important to keep in mind," Dr. Agam Rao, medical officer in the CDC's Division of High Consequence Pathogens and Pathology, said.
A 7.2 magnitude earthquake was reported in Alaska over the weekend, leading to a brief tsunami warning.
Over 11 million Americans are under a heat advisory, with the extreme weather hitting the southern U.S.
Temperatures in central and southern California could hit 120 degrees Fahrenheit this weekend.
The World Health Organization moved to classify aspartame, the artificial sweetener in diet soda, as a possible carcinogen.
The World Health Organization's cancer agency has deemed the sweetener aspartame — found in diet soda and countless other foods — as a “possible” cause of cancer, while a separate expert group looking at the same evidence said it still considers the sugar substitute safe in limited quantities.
More than a third of Americans were under extreme heat advisories, watches and warnings Thursday as a blistering heat wave that's been baking the nation spread further into California, forcing residents to seek out air conditioning or find other ways to stay cool in triple-digit temperatures.
Tourists in central Athens huddled under mist machines, and zoo animals in Madrid were fed fruit popsicles and chunks of frozen food, as southern Europeans braced for a heat wave Thursday, with a warning of severe conditions coming from the European Union’s space agency.
A new study published in Nature has found that more than 56 percent of the world's oceans have changed color in the past 20 years, and climate change is to blame.
Recently discovered teeth of a two-million-year-old human relative in Africa could give researchers new insight into genetics.
