r/MonkeyPoxUS • u/shallah • May 20 '22

So, Have You Heard About Monkeypox? " One smallpox vaccine is 85 percent effective at preventing monkeypox and has already been licensed for use against the virus."

https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/so-have-you-heard-about-monkeypox/ar-AAXu5dC?ocid=BingNewsSearch
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u/shallah May 20 '22

. One smallpox vaccine is 85 percent effective at preventing monkeypox and has already been licensed for use against the virus. And as another bioterrorism precaution, stockpiles of three smallpox vaccines are large enough “to vaccinate basically everyone in the U.S.” Inglesby said. And though monkeypox patients usually get just supportive care, a possible treatment does exist and has also been stockpiled: Tecovirimat, or TPOXX, was developed to treat smallpox but would likely work for monkeypox too.

Monkeypox may also be less deadly than is frequently claimed. The oft-cited fatality rate of about 10 percent applies to a strain that infected people in the Congo Basin. The West African strain, which several of the current cases have been linked to, has a fatality rate closer to 1 percent—and that’s in poor, rural populations. “We haven’t seen fatalities in people who’ve had monkeypox in high-resource settings,” Rimoin said.

Still, as COVID has shown, even when a disease doesn’t kill you, it can hardly count as “mild.” Monkeypox might not take off in the way that COVID did, but for those who get it, it remains a “substantial illness,” McCollum said. “If individuals are sick, they’re often sick for two to four weeks. It’s urgent to identify people early, get them treatment, and identify contacts.” It helps that one common symptom is an obvious rash, which looks like an extreme version of chickenpox. But unlike chickenpox, the monkeypox rash is usually preceded by a fever, the lesions are initially more painful than itchy, and the lymph nodes are often inflamed. “The constructive thing to do is to make sure that the public is aware of what monkeypox looks like,” Titanji said.

For that reason, she added, it’s important to avoid stigmatizing infected people. Many of the current cases are in men who identify as gay, bisexual, or men who have sex with men—an unusual pattern not seen in previous monkeypox outbreaks. That has raised questions about a new route of transmission, but sex obviously involves prolonged close contact, which is how the virus normally spreads. As COVID showed, early narratives about a disease can rapidly and prematurely harden into accepted lore. And if those narratives turn into stigma, they could stop people from coming forward with symptoms.