Tag Archives: Monkeypox

What We All Need To Know About The Monkeypox Outbreak

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Recently The Daily Wire posted an article about Monkeypox and what we need to know about it.

This is, I believe, the most important sentence in the article:

Unlike SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID, it is not a respiratory pathogen, which means monkeypox is not thought to spread via inhalation of the same air or respiratory droplets that are released during a sneeze or cough.

The article explains who is most likely to get Monkeypox:

We have also amassed a great deal of information regarding who is at risk. As of August 2, California’s Department of Public Health has reported that among its approximately 1,135 statewide cases of monkeypox, 14 have been hospitalized for the infection, with the vast majority of patients being aged between 25 and 44 years. From among the monkeypox cases with available data, 98.8% have been reported in male or transgender male individuals, with 97.2% of infected individuals identifying as gay, lesbian, or bisexual. Given this information, California’s public health website states: “While it’s good to stay alert about emerging public health outbreaks, the current risk of getting monkeypox in the general public is very low.”

The article concludes:

At this point in the monkeypox epidemic, when case numbers are relatively few and infections are concentrated among well-defined communities, we have a unique and narrow window of opportunity to adopt lessons we have learned from the COVID pandemic and enact focused protection of those who are at risk to both protect those individuals and halt the broader spread of the virus. Focused vaccination programs, educational campaigns regarding safe practices, and temporary limitations on specific events that are likely to lead to further spread of the monkeypox virus should all be considered. We learned from our initial response to the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s that we can do so while being respectful to impacted communities by focusing our language on medical risk reduction, rather than shaming individuals for their identities or personal practices. Any efforts to avoid focused protection of at-risk communities out of fear of stigmatization will cause public health agencies to squander this opportunity to contain the spread of monkeypox, effectively worsening its impact and potentially making it far more difficult to control in the future.

Given how skeptical the public has become after watching public health and political leaders make one harmful mistake after another in their attempt to manage the COVID pandemic, leaders must now set aside politics and political correctness and very transparently employ the clinical evidence about monkeypox to address this epidemic swiftly, before it spreads beyond its existing pockets. Time is running out.

We need to remember that this disease does not have to spread through the general public. Common sense measures will prevent this becoming another Covid-19. However, it might be politically advantageous for some politicians to create a panic that requires mail in ballots and drop boxes in the mid-term elections.

Information We All Need

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On Tuesday, The Washington Examiner posted an article about Monkeypox. The article provides a brief summary of the things the public needs to know.

Here are some excerpts:

In total, 92 cases of monkeypox have been confirmed so far, with another 28 suspected cases, according to the World Health Organization. Most of the cases in the U.K. and Europe have been in young men with no history of travel to Africa and who were gay, bisexual, or had sex with men.

…All of the cases that have been confirmed through a PCR test were infected by the strain native to West Africa, but only one case has a direct tie to the region. The first to be confirmed in the U.K. was a person who had traveled from the U.K. to Nigeria and back. The person was immediately isolated upon return, and “the risk of onward transmission related to this case in the United Kingdom is minimal,” the WHO said. But that still leaves open the question of where the dozens of other cases came from.

A leading adviser to the WHO, Dr. David Heymann, told the Associated Press that sexual transmission at two raves in Belgium and Spain appear to have been major catalysts for the spread of the virus in Europe.

…There is not currently a vaccine made specifically to prevent monkeypox infection, but smallpox vaccines have proven to be at least 85% effective in preventing monkeypox. Experts also believe that administering a smallpox vaccine after a monkeypox exposure may help prevent the disease or make it less severe.

The article concludes:

Infectious disease experts said this outbreak is very different from COVID-19, which caught the U.S. public health infrastructure off guard. Unlike symptoms of COVID-19 infection, symptoms of monkeypox are visual and cases are easier to trace. Monkeypox is also far less transmissible than COVID-19. And unlike COVID-19, monkeypox is not an airborne pathogen.

“Contact tracing COVID-19 is a nightmare, and I don’t want to say it’s a piece of cake, but it’s a much more straightforward proposition [to trace monkeypox],” said Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine and co-director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development.

The Food and Drug Administration has also approved several antiviral medications to treat smallpox and diseases like it.

“That’s why I’m pretty optimistic that we’ll be able to contain it because the overall level of transmissibility is low, the incubation period is longer, and in about two weeks, the characteristic rash makes contact tracing easier, and we already have vaccines and antiviral drugs ready to go. … [COVID-19 is] really just the opposite of monkeypox,” Hotez told the Washington Examiner.

At least there is some good news.