Now we have tens of thousands of cases outside of Africa and it doesn’t appear to be lethal at all and goes away on its own. Depending on the severity it seems like the biggest issue is pain/itchiness for a week or so.
So what’s the “emergency” in that context?
Honestly, IMHO, this is what the WHO should be doing: looking at the potential for pandemics and making moves ahead of time. (2) & (4) should be enough to scare the crap out of anyone who accepts the possibility of mutations once it's more widely circulating.
Smallpox is objectively horrific, and its eradication was one of public health's greatest modern triumphs. So anything close should be taken seriously.
Not panic. But pragmatic seriousness.
(WARNING: Not for the faint of heart) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox
the very nature of an "emergency" does cause panic, though. from what you are describing I don't see how that word can be justified. sounds more like "public health threat" or sth like that.
We have lots of language to say this sort of thing, but the more words you add the easier it is to be misunderstood. On a sociolinguistic level we do sort of overuse the word “emergency” but it’s primarily because we tend to do most of our “highest priority” communication with chunks of words that fit in a sound byte, or newspaper headline, or bullet point that fits on a PowerPoint slide ,or tv news lower third.
At some (I feel like close) future point, people will see “emergency” and equate it to “someone’s being cautious. This is possibly not a problem at all and therefore can be ignored.”
What’s that old saying along the lines of “intentionally use more subtle language in your writing because it gives you room to be intense later.”?
Money pox can be transmitted via infected bodily fluids, via via contact with the blisters/lesions/“rash” that forms, via inhaling droplets of infected fluids (simplest example, heavy breathing + sweaty bodies very close together), and potentially any method where infected fluids from one body come into contact with the mucous membranes of another person, so that’s the eyes, nose, mouth, etc. Also it can contaminate surfaces so there’s a risk of infection via contaminated bedding. Only one of these is mitigated by a condom.
Effectively the only preventative options are vaccinations and avoiding exposure via the normal ways, trying to not come into contact with anyone infected (the “avoiding high risk behaviour” option) and by wearing personal protective equipment such as disposable gowns, gloves, masks... which is basically all the sort of things medical staff do to prevent the spread of all sorts of diseases around hospitals, but its a whole list of stuff you need to do and remember to do right, to the point where medical staff need training and spot checking to ensure they do it right all the time... understandably its not something the public is very well equiped to do.
Oh and it’s infectious before it’s “obvious that you have monkeypox” since the first early few days the various skin symptoms could be mistaken for a zit or pimple or other skin reaction and don’t necessarily start somewhere you regularly look at, such as behind the ear.
The wikipedia article is actually pretty informative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkeypox other than not having a clear idea yet what's different about the new strain spreading around, we actually know quite a bit about monkeypox since its endemic to certain African animals there has been cases to study for decades, and the fact its related to the much more deadly Smallpox virus (the Smallpox vaccine is apparently 85% effective against Monkeypox) means its been an interesting virus for researchers to study, basically since we started trying to wipe out smallpox decades ago.
Edit: Missed a key point. The extra trouble is they need to "thread the needle" with their messaging to ensure what they are saying isn't misinterpreted as pointing the finger at the MSM (men who have sex with men) since they have mountains of evidence on how badly handled everything was with HIV/AIDS. They don't want the regular public assuming this is a disease only gay people can get, because its not, but the kinds of activities that are most likely to cause you to catch it are most commonly associated with gay men, which is sort of at odds with their first goal.
I feel safer that the WHO has declared an emergency, and so does the rest of the world.
Even if monkeypox is only an annoyance (which I doubt), if 7 billion people all have to get sick for a week, that deprives humanity of ~134 million people-years of life that they'd rather spend doing something else -- even if there are no longer-lasting impacts.
How do you figure? I got chickenpox in the 90s.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varicella_zoster_virus
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox#Cause
Similar symptoms, substantially different family trees.
So are monkeypox and smallpox, right? Related, but different diseases.
So are this year's strain of influenza, and the Spanish Flu. Related, but different diseases. Should extant monkeypox cause more alarm than extant influenza?
Nothing is a priori worthy of more or less alarm. Public health officials raise a degree of alarm based on the best epidemiological, medical, and demographic information available to them.
Smallpox is concerning, monkeypox as it is today isn't very concerning. If I understand the comments in this thread, the great concern is that monkeypox could become something quite deadly like smallpox was.
Is that risk substantially greater than the risk of a new influenza that rips through the population like the Spanish Flu once did?
If a deadly influenza strain is in our future, we're decently prepared.
On the other hand, we haven't manufactured or administered human pox vaccinations at scale in... 50 years?
The only experience we have with poxes in humans is smallpox and monkeypox. Smallpox was not a good time. Past monkeypox outbreaks have killed 5%. This one is behaving very differently, but we don't know if it's going to revert to killing people! It has in the past, like every outbreak, so it's a rational worry.
These diseases are caused by single celled organisms which keep spawning clones rather than having sex among a population. So the point you call a different COVID or influenza strain a different disease is effectively arbitrary unlike with sexual species where you can draw the line when they can’t breed with each other.
How many people are dropping dead from it? It doesn't seem like an arbitrary distinction to me.
Variola minor is a strain of smallpox with fatality rates under 1%, while some strains of monkey pox are believed to kill 10% of the infected.
In the end where exactly we draw the line within https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthopoxvirus is arbitrary, but not without justification.
All differences between two things is always arbitrary. This is something I wish more people understood. Two different things are never the same thing. You can come up with similarities based on arbitrary criteria, and that's all.
For example, what we consider make two different person a woman is arbitrary criteria that we just all agree on, or debate forever.
> How many people are dropping dead from it? It doesn't seem like an arbitrary distinction to me
You want to engage in that "forever debate of semantics", but I don't think that's your point.
Currently, it's agreed on taxonomy that chickenpox is not on the same family as monkeypox and smallpox. That's just agreed upon arbitrary categories.
Now the arbitrary doesn't mean useless. Often categories are chosen based on some practical aspect. For example it helps to group them if they have a similar behavior in some way that is often helpful to group in the default case.
An example of this is how in culinary science, a Tomato is made a Vegetable, because it's more useful to club vegetables around their flavor profile. You most of the time don't want to use a Tomato for a recipe that calls for fruits. But in botanical science, flavor isn't useful, it's more useful to think in terms of what contain seeds, thus a Tomato is made a fruit.
Each science uses their own arbitrary classification based on what is more practically useful for their line of research.
Ok, so I think your point isn't to try and tell virologists that their chosen taxonomy isn't as optimal for their line of research. But that in the case of public policy and messaging, virulence might be more important.
Even though both virus are of the same family, there is still a major difference in their virulence. And maybe that property holds more weight in this case.
I think that's a great point, but that you were arguing wrong by attacking the definition instead of bringing up the characteristic of importance and explaining why.
Now this is as much as I know of virology, so I can't say if there are good reasons to be worried about the chances of virulence changing because they are in the same family or not. But I'd say you're right, virulence is what the public cares about, and it be nicer for virologist to explain the chances of the virulence getting worse through some mutations and if they think it's high, why, or if they think it's low, why.
The herpes lineage is no joke, especially given recent evidence for long-term effects, but Orthopoxviruses has some nasty members (for humans and other economically-important species).
And when I say "nasty Orthopoxviruses," I mean ~25% case fatality rate in the affected species, with an increased fatality rate in infants. So... pretty horrible stuff. :(
These numbers seem squishy (keep an eye on the situational caveats they note for a specific row), but lists relative CFRs for different diseases. Chickenpox probably isn't going to kill you, unless you're a pregnant mother who acquires it in a specific window: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_human_disease_case_fat...
I think chickenpox spread before smallpox in any case?
Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6478203/
-98% gay/bisexual
-41% have concurrent HIV
-95% transmission by sexual activity
-13% hospitalized for derm/anogenital lesions
-No deaths
It has lost lethality in our population, thanks to a high vaccination rate, and a better understanding of how to care for people with it.
And, of course, nobody knows how lethal the dominant strain of COVID that will be circulating in 2023 is going to be.
You've named it: "tens of thousands of cases outside of Africa". It entered the white world (disclaimer: I'm white myself).
On top of that we've just lived through (hopefully) the worst if the COVID pandemic, so WHO is additionally spooked.
And apparently this decision was actually an overrule by the director - a panel actually voted against it.
> Monkeypox is a disease of global public health importance as it not only affects countries in west and central Africa, but the rest of the world. In 2003, the first monkeypox outbreak outside of Africa was in the United States of America and was linked to contact with infected pet prairie dogs. These pets had been housed with Gambian pouched rats and dormice that had been imported into the country from Ghana. This outbreak led to over 70 cases of monkeypox in the U.S. Monkeypox has also been reported in travelers from Nigeria to Israel in September 2018, to the United Kingdom in September 2018, December 2019, May 2021 and May 2022, to Singapore in May 2019, and to the United States of America in July and November 2021. In May 2022, multiple cases of monkeypox were identified in several non-endemic countries.
[0] https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/monkeypox
This is as good a reason as any.
But that's not news. That's well known. Also, generalising 'news' makes no sense. Of course news sources from certain countries will focus on news that effects their readers. Deaths from diarrhea are of little relevance to the readers of any 'western' news source.
You’re probably being downvoted for this though it’s completely true.