FORBES – Monkeypox symptoms include a fever, swollen lymph nodes and characteristic rash and the disease follows infection with the monkeypox virus, typically through close contact with infected humans, animals or contaminated materials like bed linen.
The disease is normally mild but can kill, with young children and people with compromised immune systems especially vulnerable.
The virus is a close relative of smallpox, one of the deadliest human pathogens and the only infectious human disease to have been eradicated, though it is much less severe (smallpox killed around a third of people infected in the best cases).
There are two broad groups of monkeypox virus that cause mpox infections: clade I and clade II. Data suggests infections with the former has a fatality rate of around 10% and the rate for clade II is less than 1%.
Specific treatments for infection are limited and largely untested, especially in mpox clade I infections, and hospitals are mostly restricted to providing supportive care in the worst cases.
“Many officials seem hesitant to talk in detail about the role of penetrative sex between men — that is, body part-in-orifice sex, like anal and oral sex — in the current outbreak.” – Keren Landman, MD, VOX, Aug 17, 2022
Smallpox vaccines have been shown to provide at least some degree of protection against infection, though data is limited, particularly for clade I infections.
As smallpox was eradicated globally in 1980, and eliminated in many countries much earlier, many people alive today have not received a vaccine for the virus or, if they have, will have done so a long time ago.
Other preventative measures include avoiding bushmeat, potentially infected animals and avoiding unprotected close contact with those who appear infected or materials they’ve come into contact with.
Scientists have been aware of mpox for decades, but the disease has garnered relatively little international attention as outbreaks have typically been small in scope and limited to regions in central and western Africa, for clade I and II, respectively.
Most cases were linked to spillover infections from animals and though scientists still aren’t clear what animals are the natural reservoirs of the virus, rodents are the primary suspect.
“Monkeypox is being driven overwhelmingly by sex between men.” – NBC NEWS, July 22, 2022
That all changed in 2022 when the virus began spreading globally, predominantly, though not exclusively, in networks of gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men …
