There are now 90 cases of monkeypox confirmed in the UK, with numbers rapidly increasing across the rest of the world. The institutions and individuals involved in tackling the COVID pandemic have turned their attention to tracking new cases and stockpiling vaccines. A 21 day isolation period has been enforced for high risk contacts of cases in England.
Freddie Sayers spoke to Professor David Heymann of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, one of the world’s most senior infectious disease epidemiologists. For 22 years he worked at the World Health Organisation in Geneva, as chief of the AIDS research programme and Assistant Director for Health Security. Before that he was in Africa for 13 years investigating, among other diseases, the spread of monkeypox.
How is Monkeypox spread?
Transmission mainly occurs from a sore or a lesion on a person who’s infected to a person who’s not infected by physical contact with that lesion. So if, for example, someone not infected touches a monkeypox sore on a person who is infected, that can transmit to the person uninfected through a microscopic opening in the skin. So it’s physical contact that is the major way in which this infection is transferred from one person to another.
Is it a sexually transmitted disease?
A few years ago, in Nigeria, they did identify that there was a possibility that some of their transmission could have been by contact in the genital area. They actually identified some people who had genital lesions. Now this would not be a sexually-transmitted infection. This would just be transmission by close contact of that region from one person to another. But that’s only a hypothesis that occurred at that time; there was no proof.
Could the increased prevalence be connected to the lack of vaccination against Smallpox?
Yes, it’s a very important hypothesis, because in 1980, when smallpox was certified as eradicated, one of the major concerns was would monkeypox – and this is the Central African virus strain, which is much different than the West Africa strain – would that strain replace smallpox, because it causes a disease very similar in appearance to smallpox, it has a high mortality rate of 10% and infection is prevented by vaccination. So there was a great concern after eradication that this could possibly replace human smallpox as vaccination coverage decreased because vaccination was stopped in 1980.
Could the increased prevalence be connected to the Covid vaccines?
That’s highly unlikely. All vaccination programmes are continuing to go on and none of them have been associated with with human monkeypox. There’s no possibility that the vaccines in use could convert into a monkeypox strain. That’s just not a possibility.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
Subscribe