Health officials are recommending the use of COVID-19 precautions to curb the spread of the mysterious and sudden outbreak of monkeypox in the United States as Los Angeles County becomes the latest to record its first case.
However, unlike the coronavirus, monkeypox has been here for decades, and health experts are much better prepared for the disease. While there are sporadic cases every year, the majority of the outbreaks usually stay confined within Africa.
Precautions Against Monkeypox
But in some years, the virus can spread to other continents, and this is one of those years where monkeypox has traveled internationally. Usually, monkeypox is not fatal and is nowhere near as transmissible as COVID-19.
Despite the rapid spread of the recent outbreak, health officials said that monkeypox poses a minimal risk compared to the coronavirus. LA County Public Health Director Dr. Barbara Ferrer said in the first case, which is still considered presumed, that the patient traveled domestically, as per ABC7.
Authorities said that the patient had known close contact with a positive case and that the individual was symptomatic and was currently in isolation. Officials said that the patient was doing relatively well and was not hospitalized.
Paul Chapin, who works with Bavarian Nordic, a company producing monkeypox vaccines, said that the illness was very serious. However, he noted that it was nowhere near as infectious as the coronavirus. He noted that they would most likely take all measures necessary to contain the outbreak in the United States.
According to CNN, the monkeypox outbreak has already infected more than 643 people in dozens of countries where the virus is not endemic. Many believe that the sudden outbreak of the illness simultaneously suggests that there may have been undetected transmission for some time, World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Wednesday.
International Spread
Health officials said that the monkeypox virus has been circulating for decades in various places worldwide, including some parts of the West and Central Africa. This week, early research by scientists at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology at the University of Edinburgh described how the genetic pattern they have observed suggests that there has been sustained human transmission since at least 2017.
The study found that genetic sequences showed that the first monkeypox cases in 2022 appear to have descended from an outbreak that resulted in cases in Singapore, Israel, Nigeria, and the United Kingdom from 2017 to 2019.
An evolutionary biologist and professor at the University of Arizona, Michael Worobey, who was not involved in the research, said that the results suggest that the recent outbreak has been spreading for a long time locally. It also means that the world had failed to protect those in resource-limited areas where the virus has been endemic and to control the virus at its source before it was able to spread globally.
The situation has forced diagnostic companies to race to develop tests for monkeypox in hopes of tapping into a new market as governments ramp up efforts to trace the world's first major outbreak of the viral infection outside of Africa, Reuters reported.
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