Monkeypox goes global: why scientists are on alert
nature.com
nature.com
why didn't they take advantage of COVID in this way? Phone based contact tracing was optional in most of the world.
> Human-to-human transmission of monkeypox can occur through close contact with lesions on the skin, body fluids including respiratory droplets, and contaminated materials such as bedding. Transmission via respiratory droplets usually requires prolonged face-to-face contact.
> Another puzzle is why almost all of the case clusters include men aged 20–50, many of whom are gay, bisexual and have sex with men (GBMSM).
That means it's probably less contagious if it requires anal sex to transmit.
[1] https://nationalpost.com/pmn/health-pmn/spain-monkeypox-case...
Oh man that's loaded. Why does everybody always pigeonhole male on male sex together with anal?
Not everybody is doing it, and really, why would you associate (see what I did here?) monkeypox with ass?
Mucous membranes are mucous membranes, and besides that you can't deduce anything without further information on how it transmits.
And after all, anal is a bit like Java, works with all genders.
Pretty lame-ass logic here.
Thank you for your well written humorous point here.
Consider a hypothetical autocratic regime with a history of criminalizing sexuality, committing human rights violations, and researching biological weapons. If their military felt it was time to deploy an airborne virus within enemy population centers, wouldn’t it make sense to do so simultaneously? And why wouldn’t this regime release it in a class of location that create plausible deniability, maligns a population historically persecuted by the regime, and foments societal conflict in the enemy?
Personally, given the implications, I’m hoping this warfare proves to be more informational than biological.
https://www.nti.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/NTI_Paper_BIO...
Edit: Unlike SARS-CoV-2, which spreads through tiny air-borne droplets called aerosols, monkeypox is thought to spread from close contact with bodily fluids, such as saliva from coughing. That means a person with monkeypox is likely to infect far fewer close contacts than someone with SARS-CoV-2
I think it’ll take a couple weeks until we know whether this is an evolution that has airborne transmission or it’s just being spread through physical contact (and it fortunately seems to just be the latter). Until then it’s some researchers saying it won’t spread beyond a few cases and some people saying it’s the next plague.
https://www.wallstreet-online.de/nachricht/15489723-bavarian...
The interesting part is that you can get pretty much any vaccine except the small pox vaccine now. Figure that out. They’ll give a six month baby a hepatitis b vaccine in case it has… sex or shoots iv drugs? But vaccinating for the most deadly disease ever? Can’t do it. The rational is that there’s no need given small pox has been eradicated. Yet many of the pandemic scenarios specifically cite small/monkey pox as the disease vector precisely because it’s bad and no one is immune any more.
The responsible thing would be to allow the vaccine to be taken voluntarily by adults. A certain section of the population would become immune and bring us much closer to herd immunity and either protect against an out break or very much slow it down.
Looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox_vaccine#MVA-BN there is a new non-replicating vaccine from 2013.
> The Strategic National Stockpile (SNS) has stockpiled enough smallpox vaccine to vaccinate every person in the United States. In a smallpox emergency, the SNS will coordinate with the Medical Countermeasures (MCM) coordinator or the preparedness office in the state or territorial health department. The MCM coordinator will allocate vaccine to local areas, depending upon the circumstances of the emergency.
How long that would take to roll out is anyone's guess, but I believe a vaccination campaign could rollout fairly quickly if the monkeypox outbreak turns out to be sufficiently contagious to warrant use of the reserve, assuming the reserve is effective against any possible mutations.
"When you see a claim that a common drug or vitamin 'kills cancer cells in a petri dish', keep in mind: so does a handgun."
Given that smallpox helped nearly wipe out the Native Americans, I'm doubly skeptical of "ancient Native American remedy for smallpox!" claims.
The idea that a small group of them might have found something useful, which is at least backed up by some historical medical anecdote, is not on its surface implausible.
- "As a precaution against bioterrorism, countries such as the United States maintain a supply of smallpox vaccines, as well as an antiviral treatment thought to be highly effective against the virus. The therapies probably wouldn’t be deployed on a large scale, though, McCollum says. Health-care workers would probably instead use a method called ‘ring vaccination’ to contain the spread of monkeypox: this would vaccinate the close contacts of people who have been infected with monkeypox to cut off any routes of transmission."