The WHO reported Monkeypox from 11 countries that normally don’t have the disease.
Khushi Shah, Mumbai Uncensored 21th May 2022
While some are still reeling from the Covid pandemic, there’s another virus to get to get updated with.
If you’re experiencing symptoms like headache, skin rash, fever, body aches, chills, swollen lymph nodes, and exhaustion, symptoms similar to smallpox, but milder, for an incubation period, ranging from five to 21 days you are showing signs of ‘monkeypox’.
In this unusual and unprecedented monkeypox outbreak there are more than 120 confirmed or suspected cases of monkeypox, a viral disease seldom detected outside of Africa, have been reported in at least 11 non-African countries in the past week, including the UK, that would not normally expect to have the disease.
The name “monkeypox” comes from the first documented cases of the illness in animals in 1958, when two outbreaks occurred in monkeys kept for research. However, the virus did not jump from monkeys to humans, nor are monkeys major carriers of the disease. The virus’s natural home is wild animals, which are actually thought to be rodents rather than monkeys. When someone in the rainforests of Western and Central Africa comes into contact with an infected creature and the virus makes the jump across species. Their skin erupts in a rash, which blisters and then scabs over.
A person is not contagious during the incubation period.
Unlike SARS-CoV-2, which has been spreading through tiny air-borne droplets called aerosols, monkeypox, the new virus is thought to spread from close contact with bodily fluids, such as saliva from coughing.
Because monkeypox virus is closely related to the virus that causes smallpox, the smallpox vaccine can protect people from getting monkeypox. Past data from Africa suggests that the smallpox vaccine is at least 85% effective in preventing monkeypox.
Generally, monkeypox cases are mild and people tend to recover within weeks. But the death rate varies, depending on the type. The ECDC has said that the west African clade, the type so far seen in Europe, has a case fatality rate of around 3.6% (estimated from studies conducted in African countries).
All monkeypox viruses are cousins of the one that caused smallpox, the only human virus to have been eradicated. However the strain causing the current outbreaks differs from the one in western Africa. Unlike SARS-CoV-2, a rapidly-evolving RNA virus whose variants have regularly eluded immunity from vaccines and prior infection, monkeypox virus is a relatively large DNA virus. DNA viruses are better at detecting and repairing mutations than RNA viruses, which means it’s unlikely that the monkeypox virus has suddenly mutated to become adept at human transmission.
