This is an emerging disease. It has been emerging for the last 20 to 30 years,( so) it's not unknown, it's very well described, the risk for the general public, therefore, appears to be low, because we know that the main modes of transmission have been as described in the past.

Rosamund Lewis

At the moment, we are not concerned about a global pandemic, we are concerned that individuals may acquire this infection through high-risk exposure if they don’t have the information they need to protect themselves.

What we're seeing now began as a small cluster of cases, and then the investigation rapidly led to discovery of infections in a group of men who have sex with men ... and so we don't yet know what the source of the actual outbreak is, what's most important now is not to stigmatize.

We don't yet have evidence that there's mutation in the virus itself. We are beginning to collect that information, we will be convening our groups of virologists and other experts who will discuss this very question based on the sequence of the genome of some of the cases that are being detected.

At the moment, we are not concerned of a global pandemic.

We actually have today a count of over 550 confirmed cases in 30 countries across four of WHO's six regions, what we're seeing now is really quite different.

It's been there before, and we do have a baseline of knowledge that we can build on, but there are many questions still.