Monkeypox passed on long after scabs heal

Study suggests patients remain infectious for a greater period of time than originally thought

PEOPLE infected with monkeypox may be infectious long after their scabs and rashes have disappeared, a study has found.

It has long been believed that monkeypox patients, who develop infectious lesions on their body, stop being infectious as soon as their scabs have healed.

However, analysis from NHS doctors shows this may not be the case after the virus was detected in throat swabs and blood samples long after the rash had vanished.

A study published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases reports on the disease’s progression in seven people who had monkeypox in Britain between 2018 and 2021.

These cases were all linked to travel to Africa, with one healthcare worker catching the disease after changing an infected person’s bed sheets. This instance was the first time there had been human-to-human transmission of the virus outside Africa. None of the cases – including the one child – died or needed intensive care treatment, but some were admitted to hospital as a precaution to prevent any onward transmission.

The study did not look at the current outbreak, which now totals 71 cases in Britain, with the majority catching it in the community, and a “notable proportion” in gay and bisexual men.

Dr Hugh Adler, the study’s author and a research fellow at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, said: “We hope [our study] informs the doctors and public health officials looking after cases now. We were surprised to see that you can detect the virus in a throat swab and in blood for this duration of time.

“We can see that it remains positive in the throat and blood for the length of the illness and maybe even longer after the rash is resolved,” he said.

“We don’t know that this means these patients are more infectious or infectious for longer, but it does inform us of the biology of disease.”

He added that the current outbreak might provide crucial data to build on the study’s preliminary findings to see if a person can be infectious for longer than their rash persists.

Meanwhile, Dr David Porter, a paediatric infectious diseases consultant at Alder Hey Children’s NHS Foundation Trust, urged parents to not be overly concerned about the outbreak because childhood cases in the UK were rare.

If a parent spots a rash or blemish on their child, the chances are that it is not monkeypox, but chickenpox, he said.

“As a parent, I wouldn’t be encouraging people to be trying to differentiate between monkeypox and chickenpox,” he said. The study also found promising signs that an antiviral drug designed to target smallpox, called tecovirimat, also shortens a patient’s length of illness and infectiousness, but this was tested in just one case and needs to be backed up with bigger studies.

Fourteen more monkeypox cases were reported in England yesterday, taking the UK’S total to 71.

All but one of the infections are in England, with the exception being a case identified on Monday in Scotland.

The UK Health Security Agency insists that the risk to the population nationally remains low despite the surging case numbers.