In Nigeria, which has been detecting cases on a regular basis since the autumn of 2017, many cases were only discovered because of intensive contact tracing around detected cases. Ihekweazu said finding cases may not be easy. “We’ve really taken a broad approach to making sure the message goes out, but also really capitalizing on trusted messengers and platforms that communities experiencing the current increase in monkeypox cases actually listen to and pursue,” he said. The CDC’s Daskalakis said the agency is working on a variety of fronts to get out the word, including through social media, medical providers, and social networking apps. “However, as we know, understanding when there’s a few beers disappears and risks are taken.” And I would hope that somebody does get that message out and it gets into the networks of people who are informing the Pride parades and others that this is something important for people to understand,” he said.
“I think that it’s not too late to get this message out. “I think it’s pretty widespread.”Īsked if he thought it was now too established to be stopped, Heymann said: “I don’t know what will happen in the long term.”Ī “massive” education campaign is needed to inform people of the fact that monkeypox is spreading, said Heymann, a professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. “I think we have to accept that this disease is now pretty well-implanted in certain risk populations,” he said. It is not clear how long the virus has been spreading outside of the endemic African countries, how many people have been infected, or how far afield it has traveled.īut David Heymann, who chairs an expert committee that advises the World Health Organization’s Health Emergencies Program, told STAT that he believes at this point that the virus is well-established in some quarters. The investigations into this outbreak are still in the early days. It can infect anybody that has this kind of contact.” “It doesn’t have anything to do with gender or orientation or anything. “This virus transmits with close contact and sexual contact is just inherently close contact,” Rimoin said. So the type of contact people experience during sex can lead to transmission, if one of the partners is infected. In this outbreak, there are multiple reports of infected people having lesions in the genital region or on the penis. Its main mode of transmission appears to be direct contact with the lesions that an infected person develops. Monkeypox is not considered a sexually transmitted disease in the way that HIV is there’s no evidence to date that the virus is transmitted in semen or vaginal fluids, for instance.
“We just want to be keeping an eye on that and understanding what serial chains of transmission might look like in these populations,” she cautioned. But she stressed the situation bears watching. Rimoin, who terms the outbreak “concerning” rather than “alarming,” said it remains to be seen how much serious disease the virus will trigger if it spreads among people who are HIV-positive. There have been no reports of deaths so far in the current outbreak.Īnne Rimoin, a professor of infectious diseases epidemiology at the University of California, Los Angeles, has been studying monkeypox for the past 20 years. It is believed to have a case fatality rate of under 1% and maybe lower. But the current outbreak involves the West African clade. The Congo Basin clade has a high case fatality rate, roughly 10%, in Africa. There are two clades of the monkeypox virus. So far in this outbreak similar reports have not yet been made public, although Spanish authorities have revealed that two of their earliest cases were in people who were living with HIV. Ihekweazu is the senior author on a 2020 paper that reported more severe disease in people with HIV who contracted monkeypox between 20 in Nigeria. Now the impact of the combination of that with other viruses such as HIV and especially in people that are untreated…?” Ihekweazu didn’t finish the sentence.
“In and of itself, it would in general be a fairly self-limiting viral infection that causes very unappealing skin lesions. Nigeria is one of a dozen countries in West and Central Africa where the monkeypox virus is considered endemic. “That is really what many colleagues are worried about and I think it is a legitimate cause of concern,” said Chikwe Ihekweazu, former head of the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control. Exclusive analysis of biotech, pharma, and the life sciences Learn More