For all those who fear another pandemic before the first one is over, there is some hopeful news: monkeypox will not reach COVID-19 proportions.
Dr. Eyal Leshem, director of the Center for Geographic Medicine and Tropical Diseases at Sheba Medical Center and clinical associate professor of internal medicine and infectious diseases at Tel Aviv University School of Medicine, said there is no evidence yet to show that the Monkeypox will affect as many people as the coronavirus did, mainly because it is less transmissible.
“For someone to get infected with monkeypox, close contact is necessary, unlike COVID-19 where airborne infection is not uncommon,” Leshem explained to ISRAEL21c in Spanish.
In any case, infections of the disease spread rapidly, a fact that led the World Health Organization (WHO) to declare a global emergency on July 23.
On August 3, the US Centers for Disease Control mapped more than 26,000 reported cases in 87 countries.
Dr. Hagai Levine, president of the Israeli Association of Public Health Physicians and professor of epidemiology at the Hadassah-Hebrew University School of Public Health, said that while most infections have affected men with male sexual partners, most professionals believe that there is a high probability that the disease will spread to other populations and become a larger public health problem.
“But it is very difficult to imagine that it reaches the magnitude of COVID-19,” he said.
Quick response
While Israel reported only 160 confirmed cases as of August 4, the response from the health sector has been and is swift, just as it was when the country led the world in launching COVID-19 vaccines in December 2020.
On July 27, Israel received its first shipment of 5,600 monkeypox vaccines approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) preventively for those over 18 years of age and in some cases for adults already exposed to the virus.
Priority these days is given to HIV-positive men born after 1980 (the year Israel stopped vaccinating children against virtually eradicated smallpox) and anyone who tested positive for a sexually transmitted infection (STD) in 2022.
Doctor Hagai Levine, president of the Israeli Association of Public Health Physicians. courtesy photo
Levine defined that Israel is very good at responding quickly to emergencies: “Our advantage is that we are a small country, so we have a good collaboration between the medical community and the different community organizations.”
In the early 2000s, the specialist wrote about Israel’s pioneering use of the “ring” vaccination approach (vaccinating primary and secondary contacts of an infected person) to stop mumps outbreaks in the early 2000s. 2000.
“Because of the fact that Israel is open to trying new things and we have very good data systems and good connections, today we could do a very good job of identifying the sources of monkeypox and maybe new risk factors or sources of infection. infections,” Levine told ISRAEL21c in Spanish.
how it spreads
Until now, the monkeypox virus – so named because it was first identified in 1958 in research monkeys – has been mainly confined to central and western Africa.
Mainly, the disease affects rodents and other small mammals.
This virus was first seen in humans in 1970 in the Congo and since then there have been only occasional small outbreaks.
Dr. Eyal Leshem, director of the Center for Geographic Medicine and Tropical Diseases at Sheba Medical Center. Photo courtesy of Saba
Leshem explained that this disease and other zoonotic viruses – those that jump from animals to people like rabies and Ebola – always pose a threat to humans because people have close contact with these animal life forms.
For him, the two main reasons for the current outbreak are that people born after 1980 are not vaccinated against smallpox, and that world travel is more frequent.
“When a disease is endemic in one part of the world and people travel there, the disease will also travel unavoidably,” Leshem said.
what are the symptoms
Symptoms of monkeypox are fever, blistering rash, and swollen lymph nodes. These symptoms usually go away within a few weeks without treatment, but some populations, such as people with weakened immune systems and pregnant women, are prone to more severe cases.
However, this illness rarely leads to hospitalization or death.
“It is a relatively mild disease, although we should not ignore it because it can leave scars and cause complications such as secondary infection, pneumonia, sepsis or meningitis. We also just learned of the first fatality outside of Africa,” Levine said.
The expert added that there are no mortality rates like there were with COVID-19 and also the spread is not as fast.
Is it an STD?
Despite the excessive incidence of monkeypox in men who have sex with men, the Israeli Ministry of Health emphasized that “transmission involves any type of direct or intimate contact and is not limited to people with a particular sexual orientation.” sexual”.
Thus, it is believed that the virus can even spread through infected particles on items such as bedding or towels.
For his part, Leshem said that labeling monkeypox as an STD would be a mistake: “If we define it that way, we may miss opportunities to prevent transmission other than through sexual contact.”
For him, categorizing the disease as a sexually transmitted pathology could also result in “stigmatizing patients and making people reluctant to get tested. Therefore, we must be careful and precise in our definitions.”
In that sense, he suggested changing the name of the virus to something neutral like “new smallpox” or “smallpox 2022” in order to reduce any stigma, shame or discrimination around the disease.
Also, as a public health physician, Levine thinks the name “monkeypox” is just one of the reasons many people around the world don’t pay much attention to this disease.
“There is a huge public trust problem in the health system with groups spreading misinformation, and there is a politicization of health issues. With vaccines in general there are big communication challenges. We also see ‘pandemic fatigue’. Thus, since the risk of monkeypox is lower than that of COVID-19, people tend to underestimate the evil, ”he defined.
On the other hand, the specialist stressed that the key to public health policy is to work together with the communities in promoting health and collecting epidemiological data.
Regarding that, he expressed that COVID-19 or monkeypox cannot be solved only at the federal level, but that the municipalities must be involved. And that for this it is convenient that people receive a diagnosis -even in places where they hang out for pleasure and leisure- and share that information to identify more cases so that everyone is present and confident.
Israel as a model
“Israel could be a model for other countries in the use of innovative tools such as social media and apps for both health promotion and monkeypox data collection. I think we should be working with health promotion professionals to get the right messages across in the right way,” she said.
But in parallel, he was disappointed that Israel and most other countries did not use COVID-19 to change the public health paradigm and invest much more money in personnel and epidemiological research.
“With monkeypox and in the face of the next pandemic, we need to do better,” he told ISRAEL21c in Spanish.
For his part, Leshem warned that to avoid monkeypox infection, unprotected intimate encounters (heterosexual or homosexual) must be reduced and additional vigilance between health workers and people with medical conditions that make them more vulnerable. vulnerable.
“If someone develops any symptoms, such as a rash or sore throat and fever, and they are in an at-risk population, they should get tested as soon as possible to avoid infecting others,” he urged.