We are beginning to understand how monkeypox spreads in this last outbreak of the deadly disease.
The pattern is spread through close physical contact. Especially during sex.
Believe it or not, this is actually a relief. Because one possible alternative – the pattern that spreads in the air – is much, much more dangerous.
The World Health Organization recently confirmed the transmission methods driving the three-week outbreak in Europe, Australia and the United States. “Based on currently available information, cases have been identified mainly, but not exclusively, among men who have sex with men seeking care in primary care and sexual health clinics,” the WHO said last week.
This does not mean monkeypox – a pathogen that is endemic in rodent and monkey populations in West and Central Africa and causes flu-like symptoms and rashes in humans (and can be fatal in up to 10 percent of cases, depending on the exact strain) – is a sexually transmitted disease.
In fact, experts are clear that this is not the case. Instead, it is an opportunistic disease that prefers to jump from an infected person to an uninfected one through small cuts on the skin or mucous membranes of the nose, mouth and anus. “Any close contact will allow the spread,” Blossom Damania, a virologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told The Daily Beast.
So it should come as no surprise that men who have sex with other men are an important factor in the spread of measles. David Heyman, who previously headed the WHO emergency department, told the Associated Press that men who visit raves in Spain and Belgium – and become lively with each other – “intensify” the epidemic.
“What happened was that it was in a population that amplified the show because of its behavior,” Hayman told The Daily Beast.
Mateo Prohazka, an epidemiologist for infectious diseases at the UK’s Health and Safety Agency, said he was worried the findings would be misinterpreted in a way that could be used to attack the gay community of which he is a member.
“This does not mean that gays or bisexual men are doing something wrong, or that the virus has changed or that it is sexually transmitted, it just means that this behavior facilitates transmission on these networks,” he told PinkNews. “We wanted to make sure that people understood that the show was not just for gays and bisexual men, it just happened to be part of this network.
At the beginning of the epidemic, there was widespread concern that this strain of measles could spread the way COVID spreads – in the air when we breathe, cough, talk, laugh.
Thus, the sexual aspect of viral transmission is actually a cause of relief among epidemiologists, as the number of confirmed cases – about 100 in a dozen countries outside Africa, is slowly rising on Monday. (No deaths have been reported.)
“We still don’t fully understand the extent of the outbreaks or the modes of transmission,” Lawrence Gostin, a global health expert at Georgetown University, told The Daily Beast last week.
COVID, of course, loves to travel in the very fine “aerosol” fog that everyone exhales every few seconds. These aerosols can travel through rooms and stay in the air for minutes. This is part of what makes COVID so contagious.
Experts suspect that monkeypox prefers larger droplets that do not travel that far or stay that long. “Monkeypox is not transmitted by air, but by droplets after prolonged contact,” the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control, the European version of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told The Daily Beast. statement. In other words, it seemed unlikely that the measles would spread as COVID and potentially cause its own pandemic.
But viruses are unpredictable. The idea that the measles may have mutated to move on aerosols has left many epidemiologists awake at night earlier this month, even though it is a DNA virus, so it cannot mutate as easily as an RNA virus like COVID. The world is barely coping with a pandemic. The last thing we need is a second global disease on top of the first.
We can relax … to some extent. Since measles is spread mostly through very close contact – kissing, caressing, sex – it is quite easy not to transmit it. “This disease can be controlled by changing behavior,” Heyman said.
It starts with education. Know what measles looks like – hard, round blisters – and don’t touch anyone who shows signs of infection. But there is no need for paranoia. You probably won’t catch the measles just by sharing air with an infected person.
And even if you catch it, you have options for quick treatment. Smallpox is associated with smallpox and the same vaccines work against both. The CDC alone has stored more than 100 million doses of measles vaccine.
Not only can the newest and best measles vaccine, Jynneos, prevent infection, it also works as a post-infection therapy, Hayman said. “It changes the virus.” The trick is that you need to take a dose within a few days of getting sick.
Between contact tracking, vaccines and therapies, we have the tools to control monkeypox and prevent most of the possible deaths from the virus. And now that we focus on the main routes of transmission, we can begin to rule out the possibility of a measles pandemic. “I expect him to be detained in high-income countries,” Gostin said.
To have a good chance of spreading measles, you need to connect closely and really personally with someone else. This cannot be spread out of control.
Add Comment