“Shocking Monkeypox Screw-Up Means We Need to Admit We Now Face Two Pandemics”

(This is an actual story at Daily Beast, picked up by Yahoo News. Clutch your pearls, faint on couch, read with your best breathless Paul Lynde impression. -NVP)

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By David Axe

We blew our chance to quickly contain monkeypox. Now the dangerous virus is spreading fast all over the world.

Health experts agree: the outbreak could soon qualify as a pandemic, if it doesn’t already. And the situation is likely to get worse before it gets better. More infections, more deaths, more chances for the pox to mutate.

“We are in uncharted territory with this outbreak… and still early in the event,” James Lawler, an infectious disease expert and a colleague of Wiley at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, told The Daily Beast.

The latest figures from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control are startling. The CDC tallied 9,647 infections as of July 11. That’s a fourfold increase compared to just a month ago…

“Monkeypox is clearly a global health emergency,” Lawrence Gostin, a Georgetown University global-health expert, told The Daily Beast. “It has simmered in small pockets in Central and West Africa for decades, but until now there have been no cases unrelated to travel in the rest of the world. Now it is in virtually every region of the world and spreading rapidly.”

The worst African outbreaks, involving a strain of the virus that’s endemic to the Congo River Basin in Central Africa, have resulted in official death rates as high as 10 percent.

But the more viruses spread, the more they mutate—often in ways that make them deadlier. As long as monkeypox spreads faster than health authorities can contain it, the greater the risk it’s going to spawn new, more dangerous variants, potentially driving up the death toll.

Monkeypox mostly spreads through close physical contact, especially sexual contact…

David Heymann, who formerly headed the WHO’s emergencies department, said that men attending raves in Spain and Belgium “amplified” the outbreak—apparently through close, sometimes sexual, contact with other men…

The worst outcome isn’t hard to imagine—10,000 cases could quickly bloom into 100,000 cases. Then 1 million. Various experts and agencies disagree over the precise definition of “pandemic,” but if the pox outbreak doesn’t already qualify, it’s increasingly likely that it will in the weeks to come. At that point, the world will be contending with simultaneous pandemics…

There’s still time to prevent the worst-case scenario of millions of cases and potentially thousands of deaths. The WHO, CDC and other health bodies must double down on efforts to educate doctors and speed up diagnoses—and then move more quickly to isolate and treat infected people and vaccinate those around them. “If we can get enough vaccine into high-risk contacts, this will cease,” Amesh Adalja, a public-health expert at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told The Daily Beast…

https://news.yahoo.com/shocking-monkeypox-screw-means-admit-030643200.html