The most concerning aspect of this monkeypox outbreak is how different it is from previous monkeypox outbreaks (which were mostly limited to rainforest regions of Western and Central Africa, and traceable to specific clusters originating in human contact with wild animals, with human-to-human transmission much more slow, rare, and limited than it is in the current outbreak).
In contrast, Since May 7, 2022, 94 confirmed cases, 3 probable case, and 53 suspected cases have been detected in 12 Western countries. Most of these cases have been found among people who had not recently traveled to other countries with monkeypox outbreaks and had not been in contact with wild animals, in clusters of people who have not interacted with people in other known clusters, suggesting that the reported cases are just the tip of an iceberg of much larger numbers of cases of human-to-human transmission that is spreading rapidly across many countries around the world.
Monkeypox is a nasty disease related to smallpox:
It takes one to three weeks following exposure for symptoms to begin, and people are usually sick for about two weeks. As many as 10% of victims can die from it, though the cases documented in the UK appear to be caused by a lineage of the virus known to be less virulent, with a fatality rate closer to 1%.
People vaccinated against smallpox have some immunity to monkeypox, but most people born in the 1970s and later have not had smallpox vaccines or previous smallpox infection, so most people are very vulnerable to this outbreak.
Right now the monkeypox outbreak still seems too small to worry about, but I am getting a sense of Deja Vu reading about the spread of monkeypox, as it sounds a lot like what happened when COVID-19 first started.
I wonder whether it is just a coincidence that a monkeypox pandemic might be starting now, or whether it is due partly to COVID-19 having weakened many people’s immune systems and/or many countries’ public health infrastructures so much as to enable a previously rare and slow-spreading disease to spread so rapidly and widely. If this is the case, then this could just be the start of an era of multiple pandemics that make COVID-19 look minor by comparison.