Dallas County reported the first case of monkey disease this year in Texas on Tuesday. According to the Texas Department of Health, the victim was identified as an international traveler. The agency also said the disease did not pose a threat to the public.
The department is investigating the case with the Dallas County Department of Health and Human Services and the National Centers for Disease Control. and prevention. The CDC last week raised the alert level for monkeys to level 2 to warn travelers to take precautions.
What you need to know about this disease:
What are the symptoms of smallpox?
Symptoms of smallpox include mild or severe flu-like illness and blister-like rash. Once the pustules are removed, they become scaly and fall off, in which case the patient is not considered infected.
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How do you get smallpox?
Smallpox can be transmitted through respiratory droplets, but only in close contact. This is in contrast to COVID-19, which can spread through the room in the form of an aerosol. However, monkeys do not do this, which complicates the transmission of the disease.
According to the World Health Organization, the smallpox virus is most often transmitted to humans from infected people or animals. The virus can be transmitted from person to person through close contact, such as skin-to-skin contact or contact with infected bedding or clothing.
As a precautionary measure, patients with smallpox should not be in close contact with others until one week after the scab has been removed. Rodney E. In Rohde, a professor of clinical laboratory science at the University of Texas, he studies infectious diseases such as smallpox, influenza and COVID-19.
Will monkeys cause another pandemic?
Monkey smallpox is unlikely to lead to another pandemic, Rod said, but COVID-19 is on the minds of people, people may fear another major epidemic.
“After COVID, we became very sensitive,” Rod said. “I appreciate people appreciating what’s going on around them.”
Comparisons of smallpox may also frighten some The people, Rohde said: but the lack of mortality is one of the main differences between diseases such as monkey pox and smallpox or COVID-19. As of Wednesday, there were 35 cases of monkey disease in the United States, including Dallas County, but no deaths were reported.
Most of the symptoms of smallpox go away on their own within a few weeks. According to the World Health Organization, infected newborns, young children, and people with severe immune deficiencies are more likely to be infected with monkeys and even die.
Another distinguishing feature of COVID-19 from smallpox is the reproductive rate, which indicates how many people can be infected. For a very infectious original version The coronavirus in the United States is estimated to range from 1.5 to 6.68, and an infected person can infect up to six people. The approximate reproductive level of the omicron variant ranged from 5.5 to 24, or five to 24 per person infected.
According to Rod, the reproductive level of smallpox in America is less than one, meaning that an infected person can infect one person or no one at all.
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Is monkey smallpox a new thing?
Smallpox is not a new virus and this is not the first case of smallpox in the United States. The first recorded case of human ape disease was in 1970 in the Central African Republic of Congo. The last epidemic in the United States was in 2003, when there were 47 confirmed and possible cases involving the transportation of infected animals from Ghana in West Africa.
Is there any protection against monkey smallpox?
Smallpox is a distant relative of smallpox, so the smallpox vaccine can offer some protection against smallpox. During the 2003 epidemic, the CDC developed a smallpox vaccine, increased laboratory tests, monitored infected animals, and investigated possible human cases.
The strategic national stockpile has enough smallpox vaccine to vaccinate everyone in the United States. This is different from the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Because COVID-19 was a new virus, a vaccine had to be developed. The first known vaccine against COVID-19 in the United States was in December 2020, about a year after COVID-19 was discovered in China.
“We certainly have the capacity to fight smallpox in public health and at the health level,” Rod said. “I have no idea this is jumping to a level like the flu or COVID. It would be huge. Unusual.”
Is there a monkey smallpox test?
There are 74 laboratory Response Network laboratories in the United States that can perform PCR tests for smallpox, which is consistent with the current level of infection in Rohde. However, he said it was important to make sure there were enough testing sites in Rohde, as infectious disease experts were monitoring the virus.
“It certainly reminds me once again of what I’ve always said, that this is an important need for public health surveillance and diagnostics and things like that,” Rohde said. “We can’t look back, we want our work to improve, so this is a good warning, because COVID should be at least a little quieter, and it should be a regular, funded activity to wake people up. It’s the country’s eternal need.”
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