The disease is spreading for the first time among people who have not travelled to Africa. What’s different about these cases? | Sherryn_G
Contacts of those infected are often given the smallpox vaccine, which has been shown to be up to 85 per cent effective against monkeypox and can work up to four days after exposure. Australia has a limited supply already in its national stockpile. before now and worry they may be left further behind in the new scramble for shots.Anyone who develops monkeypox symptoms should seek care at their nearest hospital, but wear a mask and call ahead first.
The first European case was confirmed on May 7 in someone who returned to England from Nigeria, which has had an ongoing outbreak since 2017. Thousands of cases have since been reported worldwide, with Europe and North America particularly affected. While the WHO says the risk from monkeypox remains “moderate” for most of the world, in Europe it classes it as “high”.Monkeypox has been spotted outside Africa before.
Mike Ryan, the WHO’s emergencies program director, has acknowledged that monkeypox surveillance has been “very poor” for a long time. “What we’re actually seeing at the moment is a little bit like the drunk man looking for his keys under the lamppost,” he said in July. “We’re looking where the light is, but we’re not looking in the dark.
Australia’s acting Chief Medical Officer, Dr Sonya Bennett, has said that while most of the monkeypox cases outside Africa have been among men who have sex with men, this virus has not traditionally been thought of as a sexually transmitted disease. Anyone can catch it through close contact.
Australia’s national incident centre has been activated in response to monkeypox since late May. And on June 1, the virus was added to the National Notifiable Diseases List to enable better reporting and data sharing over the next six months.One of the key outstanding questions for scientists is whether the virus has become more infectious among people. Unlike COVID, which is made of RNA, monkeypox is a DNA virus and so is not expected to mutate as often.
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