Monkeypox is concern, but not like coronavirus

Disease is treatable, less contagious than COVID

People should monitor the worldwide outbreak of monkeypox, health officials say, but at this point the number of cases remains relatively small and the virus is much harder to transmit than the one causing the COVID-19 pandemic.

To date, there have been more than 230 confirmed monkeypox cases around the world, including two in the U.S., according to a spreadsheet kept by the health collaborative Global.health. The two confirmed U.S. cases were reported in New York and Boston.

“The average person shouldn’t be worried about monkeypox. It’s more about knowing when and where it’s been found and monitoring your own health,” said Dan Shirley, medical director for infection prevention at UW Health in Madison. “If you have anything that seems like monkeypox, report it right away.”

However, the outbreak should be a greater concern to public health officials, said Richard Kennedy, co-director of the vaccine research group at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.

“Looking back, we had the first human cases in 1970,” he said. “But we didn’t really see a lot of cases outside of Africa. Now we’re seeing more cases outside of Africa than we have in the entire history of the disease. We need to find out why.”

So far, cases have been confirmed in 19 different countries, including England, Spain, Portugal, Canada and Israel. Kennedy said some cases are believed to have come from a so-called super-spreader event, a party in Africa that included men who have sex with other men. He said the theory is that the party participants had come from a variety of countries and developed symptoms after they returned home.

Shirley said the disease is not easily transmitted. The virus spreads through close contact with skin lesions or large droplets. The droplets would not be light enough to hang in the air like those that have spread the virus that causes COVID-19.

2003 Wisconsin monkeypox outbreak

In 2003, Wisconsin became the epicenter for a monkeypox outbreak, recording 39 of the 71 confirmed cases.

“I think the concern right now is very low,” said Paul Biedrzycki, who led the city of Milwaukee Health Department’s response to the 2003 outbreak. “It’s not widespread and it’s not very easily transmissible.”

Biedrzycki said the city conducted contact tracing in 2003 and also trapped and tested mice and rodents near exotic pet stores that had housed infected animals. Health officials did not want the virus getting loose among animals in the wild.

Unlike the current outbreak, the one in 2003 included no confirmed cases of humans spreading the disease to other humans. The 2003 outbreak, which lasted three to four weeks, came from exotic imported animals, including two African giant pouch rats, and spread to prairie dogs that were sold as pets.

People who contract monkeypox generally don’t experience symptoms until seven to 14 days after they’re infected.

The first symptoms are headache, fever, muscle aches and fatigue, but patients infected with the disease later develop swelling of the lymph nodes and a red rash that produces blisters called pustules.

“You’d have to have extremely close contact to someone who’d been infected,” Shirley said. “You wouldn’t get it just passing by an animal or a human.”

Infection, he said, would come from handling an infected animal.

People who do contract the disease can be treated by receiving the vaccine. While few hospitals have the vaccine, it can be delivered from stockpiles kept by the U.S., Shirley said.

Also, there are three antiviral medicines that have proven effective when given to animals infected with a version of the disease.

Otherwise, patients are treated with plenty of food and fluids, as well as other supportive care.

ASSOCIATED PRESS This 1997 image, provided by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, shows the arm and torso of a patient whose skin displayed a number of lesions due to an active case of monkeypox.