Now Monkeypox

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/now-monkeypox

by _Microft • 4 years ago

118 174 4 years ago

walterbell3• 4 years ago

WHO is meeting this week to vote on amendments to international health regulations, https://www.ejiltalk.org/the-far-reaching-us-proposals-to-am...

proposed US amendments to Article 12 IHR will both considerably extend the executive powers of the WHO Director-General to declare global emergency-like situations and centralise this power further by removing the need to consult and find agreement with the respective state party ... Articles 9 and 10 IHR moreover strengthen WHO’s powers to assess alleged global health risks by relying on information received outside official channels, giving the respective states only 24 hours to verify such information.
... if WHO’s powers are extended in this way, is there a need to also answer the question quis custodiet ipsos custodes (who guards the guards?), and to thus set up mechanisms ensuring that WHO complies with its obligations under the IHR and its Constitution, as well as its responsibilities for human rights deriving from customary international human rights law?

WHO's Intergovernmental Negotiating Body (INB) site has videos from their April 2022 meeting: https://inb.who.int

TimTheTinker2• 4 years ago

centralise this power

That's the part I take issue with. Any time power becomes centralized (including during emergency situations) it leads to loss of individual freedoms, and often increased anthropogenic (=human-caused) suffering.

new_stranger2• 4 years ago

If you were wealthier you would understand the importance of centralized power

mjfl• 4 years ago

yeah sorry. I'm not going to support a country that can't even talk about Taiwan "centralizing" its power.

astrange2• 4 years ago

What is the “power” here? Does the power to declare things itself result in consequences?

Nb America has too many elected positions; most democracies have fewer (are more “centralized”) but also it’s easier to fire them if you don’t like them (here it’s difficult to impossible). For instance the best reason to elect both a mayor and supervisors of SF is if you want them to fight instead of getting things done, and indeed that’s what they do.

runarberg2• 4 years ago

This is a really hard philosophical claim you have here. Especially given the fact that it uses vague terms like freedom and power, which philosophers don’t really know the full ramifications of, and whole books have been written on trying to understand what they even are.

I’m gonna call bullshit on this. This sentence can mean anything you want to, while being constructed in such a way to be arise suspicion.

That is, unless you care to clarify what you mean by power and freedom here, i.e. is patents on vaccines included in centralization of power? Is my freedom to infect those around me included?

And even after you have clarified these terms, some empirical data wouldn’t hurt either. To show a negative correlation with—whatever you call centralization of power and individual freedom (however you define it).

no-dr-onboard2• 4 years ago

and centralise this power further by removing the need to consult and find agreement with the respective state party

This is discomforting. Genuinely curious how anyone would see this as anything more than a power grab.

WalterGR2• 4 years ago

Is it intended to remove politics from science?

fragsworth• 4 years ago

The WHO is not really "powerful" like a nation is, as they do not have a military or enforcement arm, and they do not pass laws.

All they can do is decide how their funds get spent. They are granted all these "powers" to spend their funds by the participating states. Furthermore, they are restricted to spending it on things that promote world health. The worst they can do is squander the money, which isn't even all that much.

Compare this to people like Jeff Bezos who have vastly more money, 100% centralized, and effectively no restrictions on how they spend it. Whether you should be concerned about that is up for argument, but by contrast, any concerns about the WHO are pretty absurd.

thedrbrian• 4 years ago

Fascinating look at their new proposal

https://twitter.com/criticalsway/status/1526464386386345984

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1526464386386345984.html

walterbell3• 4 years ago

Thanks for posting this plain-english summary.

adrianmonk• 4 years ago

WHO is meeting this week

This seems off topic.

The article is about monkeypox. The WHO meeting is about regulations.

Yes, they are both public health issues, but that's about as close of a connection as there is.

qwerty456127• 4 years ago

I have always felt angry they stopped smallpox vaccination before I was born. Now all the boomers are immune and we are not.

nix238• 4 years ago

Why not just get your smallpox vaccination? Hint it's 35 swiss franks. ...when you visit Switzerland (in the tropical institute) ;)

dthul4• 4 years ago

afaik no smallpox vaccine is currently approved in Switzerland (according to https://www.nau.ch/politik/bundeshaus/affenpocken-swissmedic...)

krrrh2• 4 years ago

It originally had a higher rate of side effects than many other vaccines because it was a locally replicating live virus. This is why vaccinated people typically have scars because it would create a local infection and a lesion on the arm. In some rare cases this would go systemic and result in a full scale infection, so when it was locally eradicated the mass vaccination program ended in the US (1972).

Apparently the modern vaccine uses an attenuated virus so it’s less likely to cause issues. I assume that’s what is used if you elect to take it for travel in Switzerland.

code51• 4 years ago

If the smallpox vaccine has not changed a lot in the meantime... Probability of death: 1 in 1 million. Probability of death for infants: 5 in 1 million.

Still not something to take a risk.

[Comparatively, if this source is not mistaken: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/ad... for Covid vaccine 5 deaths per 1 million]

MarkMarine5• 4 years ago

The smallpox vaccine is no joke, and cause actually hurt people with fairly common skin conditions like eczema:

https://www.aad.org/public/diseases/eczema/childhood/health-...

When my unit was vaccinated before Iraq the docs were concerned for me. I had to take precautions.

nix238• 4 years ago

skin conditions like eczema

Terrible terrible....but then let's go to iraq.

ericmay• 4 years ago

Was vaccinated before deploying to Korea and that was not fun. That thing itched like crazy. But then it was nice when we deployed to Iraq and everyone else had to get the vaccine and I didn't :)

hprotagonist• 4 years ago

correction: all the boomers are probably immune.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16804475/

Itaxpica• 4 years ago

The thing about public health is that it's a game of averages. Smallpox vaccination, because of the specific details of the vaccine itself, has significant potential side effects well beyond any other modern commonly-administered vaccine. These side effects can be permanently disabling, or in some cases even cause smallpox-like illness itself. When smallpox was widespread, the downside of vaccination (side effect risks) was much smaller than the downside of not vaccinating (dying of smallpox). Now that smallpox has been eradicated, the calculation is changed - on average the damage that will be done by side-effects in a wide-spread vaccination campaign are outweighed by the extremely small risk caused by not vaccinating.

That leaves the question of whether a better (safer) smallpox vaccine could be developed - I don't know enough about medical science to know if that's feasible, but even if it is it's likely not worth the cost and effort to develop a new vaccine for a disease that is no longer really a threat.

gus_massa2• 4 years ago

That leaves the question of whether a better (safer) smallpox vaccine could be developed.

I found this last week in Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox_vaccine#MVA-BN is a new non-replicating vaccine available since 2013.

david_l_lin• 4 years ago

The rise of zoonotic infections should not be surprising at all given the rate of deforestation and general disregard for nature.

DerArzt• 4 years ago

Yeah, but monkeypox isn't a new one. It's been around since the 70's.

onlyrealcuzzo• 4 years ago

We were averaging a potential pandemic every 3 or so years for the last ~20 years.

Original SARS, Bird Flu part 1, MERS, Swine Flu (arguably an actual pandemic), Bird Flu part 2, Covid.

No one should be surprised that there's a new possible pandemic 3 years after Covid.

If this ends up being another actual pandemic - that would be surprising.

husainfazel• 4 years ago

Add gain of function / deliberate bio-terrorism in there as well.

Feb 1992 - a Soviet defector revealed to Western intelligence that he had overseen an extensive, illegal programme to develop smallpox into a highly effective biological weapon:

Ken Alibek believes that, following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, unemployed or badly-paid scientists are likely to have sold samples of smallpox clandestinely and gone to work in rogue states engaged in illicit biological weapons development.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/coldwar/pox_weapon_0...

June 1998 - The WHO recommends that all smallpox samples should be destroyed https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199808203390811

Feb 2002 - WHO says that Russia and US can keep their smallpox samples https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2002/02/wide-ran...

Nov 2002 - CIA claims that Russia, France, Iraq and North Korea have "secret" stashes of small pox (erm you already know Russia has them, that's not a secret) https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2002/11/cia-beli...

Sep 2019 - Explosion and fire break out at Russian lab known for housing deadly smallpox virus https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/17/health/russia-lab-explosion-s... https://www.livescience.com/russia-lab-stores-smallpox-explo...

historia_novae• 4 years ago

"No one died in the 2003 outbreak"

Yet we will be stripped of our rights again for the exclusive benefits of a fews mega-corps and the "news" reportings are preparing the ground for it. At least this time I'll have some money to invest in the company producing the vaccine.

Vecr• 4 years ago

Look up "ACAM2000" and "JYNNEOS", those are the candidate vaccines for widespread use in the US.

RspecMAuthortah• 4 years ago

I had smallpox growing up in a third world country, how protective would the immunity be going against that?

jonny_eh• 4 years ago

Apparently the smallpox vaccine protects against monkeypox, I imagine recovering from one would protect against the other.

mmastrac• 4 years ago

Not total but some protection. The last article I read suggested a fully vaxxed person still had a couple of lesions (how it was detected). Definitely better than a full blown attack.

etiam3• 4 years ago

As Lowe notes in the blog piece, statements of about 85% protection from the smallpox vaccine are going around.

I haven't seen anything in particular about the protection resulting from a full-blown, non-attenuated infection, but as I understand it from discussions apropos another pathogen of fame lately, the rule of thumb is more comprehensive and lasting immunity from going through the disease as compared to vaccinations.

That is, I believe you ought to be in great shape compared to most of the world population.

What was it like? If it can be meaningfully described...

retrac2• 4 years ago

Big caveat: we don't actually know, because it hasn't been studied, because human monkeypox is very rare. Still, some conjecture:

You're very probably immune. Recovery from smallpox almost always meant life-long immunity and re-infection was basically unknown when it was common. The orthopoxviruses are known to have a lot of cross-immunity. People who get cowpox are immune to smallpox, and vice versa. The classic smallpox vaccine used widely in the 20th century was just a very mild strain of pox (genetically somewhere between smallpox and cowpox, and of uncertain origin now lost to history) which causes almost no illness in humans.

rogerallen• 4 years ago

"another less in [sic] real-time virology"

A typo in the first sentence? In Science? Wow...

frogpelt• 4 years ago

Yes, but it's a blog.

_Microft3• 4 years ago

"In the pipeline" is a blog by Mr. Lowe and was only recently moved to the science.org domain (it could be found at blogs.sciencemag.org before). I wouldn't expect his articles to be proof-read by anyone else but himself to be honest.

etiam3• 4 years ago

Since Science Magazine was also at sciencemag.org until recently, I don't really see that the move indicates anything about change in the relation between it and "In the Pipeline".

I pretty much agree about the proof-reading though.

WalterGR2• 4 years ago

Looks like speech-to-text gone bad. I'd call it an editing error.

SoftTalker• 4 years ago

Yeah, I saw that too, and thought he probably uses a speech-to-text approach to drafting his articles. That seems like the sort of mistake speech recognition would make. But it could also be auto-correct or even a real typo.

latchkey2• 4 years ago

"The scenario (from march 2021) simulates a monkeypox outbreak in starting in 'brinia' on 15 May 2022 that was an engineered strain for vaccine resistance."

https://www.nti.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/NTI_Paper_BIO...

It's some coincidence there is an actual outbreak in May 2022 in Britain.

therein• 4 years ago

Kinda funny that you are being downvoted. Even the date was spot on. But you're getting the downvotes from the "oh they do these things all the time" crowd.

latchkey2• 4 years ago

The same post got 12 upvotes so I'll call it even...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31455056

HN works in mysterious ways, so I just upvoted you. =)

throwaway821909• 4 years ago

"the outbreak takes place during a national holiday with extensive domestic and international travel by Brinians"

"population 250 million"

Doesn't sound like Britain at the moment

bigmattystyles• 4 years ago

If not for our COVID-19 reflexive memory would this still be a huge story or does it just get hits? I'm genuinely asking, it's good to be informed and help out those afflicted but is this just an easy way to get eyeballs? (I just realize I may sound like a kook saying `it's the media` but I'm genuinely curious)

k__• 4 years ago

Probably.

As far as I know, they aren't air transmittable, so I don't see the problem.

maxerickson2• 4 years ago

It can spread by droplets (lesions do develop in the mouth).

DANK_YACHT• 4 years ago

SARS, MERS, and Swineflu all garnered attention at the time. An outbreak of a new disease is interesting, regardless of what happened the last 2+ years.

AnonCoward4• 4 years ago

It's noteworthy for sure, however I am more annoyed by how it is reported. It was always like that for sure, however when the same medium proclaims being the arbiter of truth (fact checkers) I get really disgusted.

flavius296632• 4 years ago

Probably not, there have been countless outbreaks and epidemics in the past, all got some attention and media scare. But we haven't had a pandemic since 1920s, so I would bet on the 99.9% chance of it being just a media scare, rather than a new pandemic.

chaosite• 4 years ago

You mean, haven't had a pandemic since 2020?

wwweston• 4 years ago

This was certainly my bet in January and February 2020 -- "this is like H1N1, it won't be that bad" or "it'll be like SARS and be contained."

ilamont2• 4 years ago

Even if COVID-19 did not happen, this would still get a lot of play because of the name which lends itself to sensationalism and fear. Monkeypox, flesh-eating bacteria, mad cow disease ... these are the things that get played up, while Clostridium difficile, Shigella, and other infectious diseases with obscure names mostly get a collective shrug.

guerrilla2• 4 years ago

Wait wait wait, are you sure it's not the other way around? That those things don't get those names because they're played up? Monkeypox, flesh-eating bacteria, mad cow disease all have boring scientific names but these are the names the media uses to play them up!

aaronblohowiak• 4 years ago

mad cow / cjd / prion disease is in a different league from all the others you mentioned; there's very little recourse and it is scary how difficult it is to sterilize anything that may have been exposed.

joshspankit• 4 years ago

Don‘t forget bird flu and swine flu

krrrh2• 4 years ago

The biggest outbreak of monkeypox in the U.S. occurred in 2003, when health authorities found 47 confirmed and probable cases in six states — Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Missouri, Ohio, and Wisconsin. “All people infected with monkeypox in this outbreak became ill after having contact with pet prairie dogs. The pets were infected after being housed near imported small mammals from Ghana. This was the first time that human monkeypox was reported outside of Africa.” During this outbreak, 28 adults and two children were given the smallpox vaccine and “no serious adverse events were reported.” Not only did this outbreak not turn into a major public-health crisis, it barely made the national news. When the New York Times wrote about it back in June 2003, the story ran on page A20.

Emphasis added, source:

https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/what-you-nee...

With some exceptions the youngest people who received the smallpox vaccine in America are now 50, so it’s possible that we’ll see more monkeypox cases than previously (the smallpox vaccine provides 85% protection). We were able to eradicate smallpox completely because it has no animal reservoir, unlike monkeypox which also infects rodents and monkeys.

sbf5012• 4 years ago

Ebola was big in the 90's, even made a best-selling book and film about it (with Dustin Hoffman) but it only impacted certain African nations, and for decades. I feel the same way as you, and my gut tells me it is a little of both: an actual scary virus that probably won't explode COVID-like, but media hype worthy because every new outbreak of something awful has always been good sensationalism. I look at articles from science sources versus USA Today-like sources for my own opinion.

HideousKojima• 4 years ago

There were at least two Tom Clancy novels about ebola as well (though it was a genetically modified and weaponized version in one of those instances)

qsdf38100• 4 years ago

I have an alternative. Maybe it’s not sensationalism, maybe it’s just that journalists do not know the future, and this could potentially become a significant health issue.

Terry_Roll2• 4 years ago

So I got to spend an afternoon with one of those mad scientists from Porton Down, the UK biological and chemicals weapon testing place. The stuff they have there makes Ebola look like a walk in the park.

So there are parts of the body the immune system cant go, like the gonads, and eyes, the viruses like Ebola can get in there like toxoplasmosis (eye floaters from cat faeces) and then you become a carrier. Men can pass on Ebola through semen which was being seen in Africa not so long ago and yet still test negative for Ebola!

And then there is global warming like the Artic permafrost thawing that has the potential to release long since forgotten threats. https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/Permafr...

So with increased numbers of people travelling and the global population going up, the risks keep going up so I'm not surprised WHO want to take control of this globally. At least they issued a directorate to reduce the number of cycles a PCR test goes through. Putting aside somewhere between 80 and 85 different PCR testing machines, which are not standardised, some countries were only using a cycle threshold of 18 whilst others were using a higher cycle threshold of 45. The cycle threshold can be likened to microscope magnifications, at some point the fluorescence of past viral debris will show up like a live virus the higher the cycle threshold goes.

Now with out this WHO directorate, you would probably be seeing more lockdowns in some parts of the world and other parts spreading Covid like wildfire. Sure its hard to argue things could have been better or worst when we cant jump into parallel universes, but COVID isnt over yet and monkeypox could trigger more lockdowns.

It also shows that countries need global guidance.

matthewdgreen• 4 years ago

Of course it would. Look at the attention paid to past Ebola outbreaks that mostly didn't even leave West Africa. Hell, one single doctor was repatriated and treated at a CDC isolation lab, and that single case led to a huge amount of panic and controversy. Monkeypox is a mysterious new disease that is much less deadly (good!) but has made it to several continents (surprising!) and has done it against all historical precedent.

patrickaljord• 4 years ago

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/23/belgium-introduces-mandatory...

codefreeordie• 4 years ago

Well, this is the reason why a big deal is being made out of monkeypox. Covid is no longer an adequate reason to justify locking the world down.

s5300• 4 years ago

Perhaps as big as h1n1 however decade+ long ago that was.

GekkePrutser3• 4 years ago

Of course all diseases gain traction in the media in some way. That's normal.

I'm sure this is hyperinflated in the media due to covid however. This monkeypox news is everwhere and most countries have literally a handful of cases, most of them traced to sexual contact (which means large spread is not likely). Really, this warrants the same disinterest as we had in covid in early Feb 2020. But instead it's getting treated as if it's covid-2022. Some caution is of course warranted but I think this is really a knee-jerk reaction.

They're already talking about mandatory quarantines and reporting here (monkeypox dashboard, lol). It would probably be a postage stamp on page 10 if it hadn't been for covid, less than bird flu or swine flu was. Even though the mandatory measures are mostly gone, we still have a ways to go to be really 'back to normal' where people are not constantly worried about diseases. A pandemic is a once-in-a-century event and we shouldn't treat every disease as one until it is.

petre2• 4 years ago

Belgium already has a compulsory 21 day quarantine for monkeypox in place after some cases were linked to two rave events, one in Spain and the other in Belgium.

People are already spreading misinformation online about the disease.

This article is from an Utah and most likely Mormon news source, so expect some bias:

https://www.deseret.com/2022/5/23/23138042/monkeypox-2022-be...

blagie• 4 years ago

Broadly speaking:

1) Diseases are a growing issue, with increased human population and travel.

2) It's hard to predict which ones will become pandemics.

It's kind of like asking whether a game of Russian Roulette is a big deal or just a story to get hits. You don't know until you pull the trigger.

maxerickson2• 4 years ago

It can still go either way. It's likely enough that the global spread will end with identified cases in the low thousands though (people that are shedding virus tend to have readily identified symptoms).

astrange2• 4 years ago

Also, this one is likely similar to AIDS where it’s actually spreading as an STD. In that case you wouldn’t learn it as the media would think that’s gross and not want to report it.

rich_sasha• 4 years ago

The crazy thing about exponential growth is how quick it is, almost regardless of the base.

If I see 1 case one week, then 10 cases two weeks later, and pushing 100 two weeks after that, it’s pretty scary.

Melatonic• 4 years ago

I think it would - people have mostly forgotten about Smallpox due to a very successful vaccination campaign but it is still in public memory.

brodouevencode• 4 years ago

Transmission information according to the CDC:

Transmission of monkeypox virus occurs when a person comes into contact with the virus from an animal, human, or materials contaminated with the virus. The virus enters the body through broken skin (even if not visible), respiratory tract, or the mucous membranes (eyes, nose, or mouth). Animal-to-human transmission may occur by bite or scratch, bush meat preparation, direct contact with body fluids or lesion material, or indirect contact with lesion material, such as through contaminated bedding. Human-to-human transmission is thought to occur primarily through large respiratory droplets. Respiratory droplets generally cannot travel more than a few feet, so prolonged face-to-face contact is required. Other human-to-human methods of transmission include direct contact with body fluids or lesion material, and indirect contact with lesion material, such as through contaminated clothing or linens.

https://www.cdc.gov/poxvirus/monkeypox/transmission.html

ryandvm• 4 years ago

Not looking forward to seeing "bush meat preparation" turning into a red vs blue issue...

RappingBoomer• 4 years ago

red: bush meat provides vital nutrients and is the perfect paleo diet! blue: bush meat consumption increases worldwide temperatures! If you eat bush meat, you dine with hitler!

bufferoverflow2• 4 years ago

So basically you either have to cough into someone's face, or kiss them, or get bitten, or have sex with them to transmit the virus.

Stop worrying. This isn't another coronavirus-level pandemic.

GekkePrutser3• 4 years ago

Not to mention most of the identified infections were sex-related, making it even less of an issue. Most people aren't promiscuous so it will be very difficult to spread far that way. There's other transmission routes of course but they seem to be much less potent.

tonyg• 4 years ago

FTA: "people are poring over the data right now and comparing it to "classic" monkeypox sequences to see if this a new variant, perhaps with enhanced transmissibility. So far there are no glaring signs of that, but this work is very much ongoing; it's just too early to draw any conclusions."

at-fates-hands2• 4 years ago

This was an interesting development:

Health officials are investigating whether a number of monkeypox cases in the UK were sexually transmitted – in what one expert fears could be the first recorded instances of their kind.

The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) has detected seven monkeypox cases in total, all of which were diagnosed between 6 and 15 May. Four new ones were confirmed last week. Three of the new cases are in London and one linked case is in the north east of England. All four sufferers are men who identify as gay, bisexual or as men who have sex with men (MSM).

https://inews.co.uk/news/health/monkeypox-uk-outbreak-first-...

outworlder4• 4 years ago

AIDS had even less avenues for transmission and it became a pandemic.

mdp20212• 4 years ago

cough into someone's face

That is not a necessary limited interpretation of «prolonged face-to-face contact».

outworlder4• 4 years ago

Respiratory droplets generally cannot travel more than a few feet, so prolonged face-to-face contact is required

On no, not this droplet thing again. The CDC said the same thing about SARS-COV-2. Hopefully they are right this time.

oldstrangers• 4 years ago

They didn't realize covid was essentially airborne at the time. Monkeypox is definitely not an airborne virus (yet).

yupper324• 4 years ago

I think the biggest failure wasn't the CDC being wrong at first, it was society not being receptive to changes. It's impossible to be correct every single time. The only thing they can do is say what they know so far.

rsweeney21• 4 years ago

tldr: "Overall, I would say that this is in the don't-panic-but-keep-a-close-eye-on category."

baggy_trough• 4 years ago

I have read that the outbreak is concentrated in gay men via sexual transmission. The article doesn't say anything about that, which I would say is par for the course for public health communication, if this is indeed the case.

cronix• 4 years ago

From what I've read, you're partially right in that many are from "gay, bisexual or have sex with men," but have not concluded that it is specifically due to sexual transmission. The WHO used the term "leading theory" when talking about "sexual transmission."

In an interview with The Associated Press, Dr. David Heymann, who formerly headed WHO's emergencies department, said the leading theory to explain the spread of the disease was sexual transmission among gay and bisexual men at two raves held in Spain and Belgium. Monkeypox has not previously triggered widespread outbreaks beyond Africa, where it is endemic in animals.
"We know monkeypox can spread when there is close contact with the lesions of someone who is infected, and it looks like sexual contact has now amplified that transmission," said Heymann.
Other scientists have pointed out that it will be difficult to disentangle whether it is sex itself or the close contact related to sex that has driven the recent spread of monkeypox across Europe.
U.K. officials have said "a notable proportion" of the cases in Britain and Europe have been in young men with no history of travel to Africa and who are gay, bisexual or have sex with men. Authorities in Portugal and Spain also said their cases were in men who mostly had sex with other men and whose infections were picked up when they sought help for lesions at sexual health clinics.

The only concrete thing I think we can reasonably conclude is that it is easier to spread via 2 naked people who have a lot of skin on skin contact vs say 2 clothed people hugging, regardless of the specific activity engaged in.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/monkeypox-spread-sex-raves-euro...

karaterobot• 4 years ago

To summarize the linked blog post (emphasis because this is not a news article, an urgent bulletin, or a report on research findings):

Cases of Monkeypox have been popping up around the world. Monkeypox is not a new disease, is "not particulary contagious", and is rarely fatal. The provocative thing is that numerous cases are popping up at the same time in different parts of the world.

h2odragon• 4 years ago

Its a blog post from an author with a long history of effectively communicating complex things without extra hype and with entertainment value. Don't miss the "things I wont work with" posts.

tikkun• 4 years ago

This virus is a great place for effective altruism biosecurity projects to focus. By building up expertise solving real challenges, we'll be in a better spot with future pandemics. Anti-fragility by figuring out small challenges so we're better prepared for the big ones.

_Microft3• 4 years ago

You might be happy to learn about CEPI [0][1], the "Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations". They have the goal to ship vaccines 100 days [2] after outbreak of a pandemic by doing a lot of the research and testing in advance. They plan to create "templates" for vaccines for two dozen different viruses that pose a risk of causing a pandemic and test these in advance for safety and dosage, so that they only need to be slightly tweaked for an actual pandemic.

[0] https://cepi.net/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalition_for_Epidemic_Prepare...

[2] https://100days.cepi.net/100-days/

paywallasinbeer• 4 years ago

Interesting context: WHO officials said: "the most recent surge in cases appears to have been spread among men who have sex with other men"

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/23/monkeypox-outbreak-is-primar...

m0a0t0• 4 years ago

If the close contact during sex is a good way to get infected then it makes sense that a group that are largely cut off sexually from the rest of the population would see it first.

I think this information is from the UK where MSM are more likely to be engaged with their sexual health (ie get tested more often) than the population generally

lwhi4• 4 years ago

Now this is totally unfounded, and verging on the nutty conspiracy theory side of life .. so please do feel free to cut me down; but is there a possibility that this type of unusual virus / unusual pattern of transition, could be part of a larger terrorist type plot?

The western world is currently at loggerheads with Russia. Russia has a track record of subterfuge (e.g. Salisbury poisoning in the UK).

Feels like the gay community have been the most affected, which seems odd to me. The Russian government definitely doesn't hold much love for the LGBT community.

Many of the people who have become symptomatic haven't been able to be traced to other people who've been similarly infected.

Am I nuts for thinking along these lines?

newsclues• 4 years ago

Or a globalist conspiracy to distract and divide people, while allowing more power to be centralized?

Are there mid terms this year?

danenania2• 4 years ago

In our globalized world, everyone suffers in a pandemic. This kind of attack would be as likely to devastate the attacker as their opponents, so there's really no motivation for a government to carry out attacks like this. It's another form of MAD deterrence.

If it was possible to target people with specific genetics, it might be a slightly more realistic scenario. But considering that viruses regularly evolve enough to jump between species, it could still easily evolve to hurt the 'favored' population group as much as 'enemy' groups.

On that note, if there's any silver lining at all to pandemics, they really do align the interests of all humans like no other threat/problem, save perhaps for some sci-fi scenarios like an impending asteroid impact or alien invasion. When it comes to viruses, we're all in the same boat.

lwhi4• 4 years ago

In my nutty conspiracy, the agent would simply disseminate the virus at bath houses.

The more I think about it, the more it does seem like a nutty conspiracy.

I did watch twelve monkey's many years ago!

capitainenemo2• 4 years ago

But putting further stress on the countries opposing might help a cut-off Russia in the short term...

I mean they already have virtually no travel across their borders, and what happens in next few months is probably of greater urgency to them than later.

capitainenemo2• 4 years ago

https://metro.co.uk/2022/05/20/russia-planned-to-use-monkeyp...

"Russia’s military scientists researched using monkeypox as a bio-weapon until at least the early 1990s, according to newly resurfaced interviews with a former Russian army colonel."

323• 4 years ago

Russia performed very poorly in the Covid pandemic, it had one of the highest death rates in the world.

It would be a pretty dumb plan for them to start a new pandemic.

outworlder4• 4 years ago

Am I nuts for thinking along these lines?

Probably. Unless some "gay gene" was identified and this virus was targeting carriers very specifically, any weapon like this is completely indiscriminate. Even if they somehow deliberately infected them, it would not be contained in the community for long.

Feels like the gay community have been the most affected, which seems odd to me.

It can be sexually transmitted (among other vectors). Homosexual behavior is not the issue. Unprotected sex is (much higher chance if it's anal, as in most sexually transmitted diseases). And, it seems, any sort of close contact is sufficient. It's understandable that the gay community would be the canary for this issue. There's also some percentage of the population that will engage in unprotected sex regardless of orientation.

lwhi4• 4 years ago

I like your candour :)

It can be sexually transmitted (among other vectors). Homosexual behavior is not the issue. Unprotected sex is (much higher chance if it's anal, as in most sexually transmitted diseases). And, it seems, any sort of close contact is sufficient. It's understandable that the gay community would be the canary for this issue. There's also some percentage of the population that will engage in unprotected sex regardless of orientation.

I thought all that was needed was close physical contact (rubbing against a sore, sharing a towel etc). I don't think unprotected sex / anal sex is the issue here. Definitely doubt a condom is going to help much ..

.. and as far as I know, Monkey Pox isn't a sexually transmitted disease. All seems very odd to me.

However, as for me being nuts; maybe there is a high probability :)

lizardactivist3• 4 years ago

Financial terrorist plot perhaps, if there could be hundreds of billions to be made in vaccine contracts.

Let's wait and see who makes the most accusations, and most importantly, who stands to gain from all of this.

yucky• 4 years ago

Feels like the gay community have been the most affected, which seems odd to me.

Why would that seem odd, HIV/AIDS has always predominantly affected the gay community so this wouldn't the first virus to do that.

lwhi4• 4 years ago

Because HIV/AIDS is a sexually transmitted disease.

Monkey Pox just requires close contact.

cma• 4 years ago

Apparently the initial wide spread may be due to sexual transmission at two raves:

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/monkeypox-likely-...

mhb• 4 years ago

The virus is spread through close contact with people, animals or material infected with the virus. It enters the body through broken skin, the respiratory tract, the eyes, nose and mouth.

Though human-to-human transmission is believed to occur through respiratory droplets as well, that method requires prolonged face-to-face contact because the droplets cannot travel more than a few feet, according to the CDC.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/23/monkeypox-outbreak-is-primar...

cosmiccatnap• 4 years ago

Typo in the first sentence of an article is never a good sign.

loopdoend• 4 years ago

Too bad it’s your first exposure to this publication/author.

wonderwonder2• 4 years ago

I think it's a big deal because viruses get clicks now in the age of covid. The articles often include graphic images to drive engagement. It's a hard to spread virus that currently appears to be concentrated in men engaging in homosexual intercourse. No one has died and they respond well to the existing smallpox vaccine. It's currently media driven and nothing to worry about. That could change but currently nothing to do.

basisword• 4 years ago

> I think it's a big deal because viruses get clicks now in the age of covid.

SARS, MERS, bird flu. These were all big news too.

> It's a hard to spread virus that currently appears to be concentrated in men engaging in homosexual intercourse.

Do these people not matter? Also, have you forgotten HIV? Really struggling to find your point here.

wonderwonder2• 4 years ago

Sars, mers, etc. were airborne, monkey pox is not. Monkey pox has hit the US before in 2003, not much media hysteria. I am saying that in the age of covid , viral infections generate clicks. I have not forgotten about hiv, this is not hiv. It's an easily cured, well understood virus with an existing effective vaccine. The point was that with the current method of spread already understood and identified as requiring direct intentional contact that this is not a virus we should all be panicking and isolating over.

kkfx• 4 years ago

Smallpox was an issue, and since we can't really be sure it's eradicated it's still an issue and one of the very few potentially dangerous vaccines worth risking in the childhood, instead of many other risky, useless at best, normally only dangerous but economically interested from the criminals against humanity commonly known as "Big Pharma" and their "public" branches like WHO. So it MIGHT BE true and MIGHT BE a certain danger.

However since the n-th commercial pandemic declarations such aforementioned criminal institutions have ZERO credibility, so until their heads got arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment along with their subjects fellow politicians and private top investors NOTHING they say can be credible.

So my dear real* scientist you have a social duty: asking for IMMEDIATE incarceration of such criminals for the sake of Democracy and humanity in general. If you keep silent for profit and tranquility beside being held accountable in the not too near future in court for fairness with them you'll probably concur to a such big genocide that nazi crimes will be remembered as a small event in human history.

NO, I'm not joking.

ajmarsh• 4 years ago

From CDC.gov

TLDR: Yes the Smallpox vaccine is effective against Monkeypox but it's not generally available.

https://www.cdc.gov/poxvirus/monkeypox/clinicians/treatment....

bitfhacker• 4 years ago

I think that the world in entering in a mass hysteria mode with virus, pox, flu cow, influenza A, B, C, D etc.

Please... start to live more.

I see people that are afraid to "go outside" and have a coffee with a friend or that won't go lunch because its afraid to have *put a disease in here**"...

lizardactivist3• 4 years ago

Will there be a new mass-vaccination and contact-tracing on our phones?

Will Astra Zeneca's large vaccine factory suddenly burst into flames when they are about to begin production?

Will the lion's share of contracts then go to U.S. Big Pharma?

Will their prices conveniently go up by 20% the year after?

Will we discover once again that Moderna patented specific genetic sequences of this virus a whole year before it was even spoken of in the news?

Let's see if there's a repeat of events, and if we can learn something this time around.

yupper324• 4 years ago

Will the lion's share of contracts then go to U.S. Big Pharma?

What is this comment supposed to mean? Do you want the contracts to go to the small mom-and-pop pharma companies?

Monkeypox, if it becomes a real big problem, will likely be very different than Covid-19. I think if we learn anything its that we should let the experts do their job and just listen to their advice, and not automatically think that everything we learned from Covid-19 will transfer over. It's pretty straightforward to do that, but we haven't even mastered that yet.

lizardactivist3• 4 years ago

Read the line above, and put one and one together.

sto_hristo• 4 years ago

Will you tell about the aliens and 5G again?

Izkata• 4 years ago

Here's one that's already making the rounds - Wuhan Institute of Virology was experimenting with constructing monkeypox virus last year: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1995820X2...

Meanwhile apparently on Chinese social media the claim is that the US released it intentionally: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10845749/Conspiracy...

Aaaand their basis for that is remarkably similar to Event 201, a simulation about a coronavirus pandemic that happened in 2019, that originated in bats ( https://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/event201/scenario.ht... ).

gus_massa2• 4 years ago

Will there be a new mass-vaccination [...]?

Probably not. It's not so contagious, for transmission is necessary close proximity and there are no asymptomatic cases. So I guess they will use ring vaccination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_vaccination I.E. If you get sick, they will vaccinate everyone that met you and everyone that met someone that met you, and perhaps everyone that met someone that met someone that met you.

and contact-tracing on our phones?

If it's solved soon as I expected: no.

If it takes more time, perhaps. Explaining ring vaccination is difficult and people will complain that the government is only vaccinating X and not Y. So they must do something for everyone, and an app is an easy solution. Also, remember that Big Telco already has all your data, and the government can get that easily, so a contact-tracing doesn't give them much more info.

retrac2• 4 years ago

I'm starting to wonder if monkeypox was always a real threat for wide spread in principle, but it never did because the global population was, coincidentally, largely immune to it because of widespread smallpox vaccination.

A paper from 2010 suggests that the outbreaks in Nigeria started around the time when herd immunity from the last smallpox vaccination campaigns in the area (1980s) would be substantially fading, with the majority of the population not immunized, having been born after:

Factors associated with increased risk of infection included: living in forested areas, male gender, age < 15, and no prior smallpox vaccination. Vaccinated persons had a 5.2-fold lower risk of monkeypox than unvaccinated persons (0.78 vs. 4.05 per 10,000). Comparison of active surveillance data in the same health zone from the 1980s (0.72 per 10,000) and 2006–07 (14.42 per 10,000) suggests a 20-fold increase in human monkeypox incidence.
[...]
More than 90% of cases identified in our surveillance program were born after mass smallpox vaccination campaigns officially ceased, and less than 4% of infected individuals had evidence of previous smallpox vaccination. Furthermore, our data suggest that vaccine-induced immunity is long lasting because individuals who were vaccinated against smallpox over 25 y ago still appear to be at significantly reduced risk of monkeypox.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1005769107

Centigonal• 4 years ago

I'm seeing a lot of conspiratorial thinking on Twitter and elsewhere where people think it's just too suspicious that a new virus has popped up so soon after COVID-19. If you're harboring these suspicions, it might be worth reading a little about the Poisson Distribution[1] and Frequency Illusion[2].

Because the appearance of an emerging disease isn't generally correlated to the appearance of another, different disease (big assumption here), there is no guarantee of even spacing. Furthermore, we've had over 30 emerging infection diseases pop up in the last 30 years[3]. They're much more likely to receive increased attention now however, due to heightened worldwide awareness of infectious disease from COVID-19.

I'm not saying that there's definitely no conspiracy, but Occam's Razor says cognitive bias is a much more likely explanation for why monkeypox seems so oddly-timed than Bill Gates's secret world domination plan.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisson_distribution

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion

[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5618832/

timst4• 4 years ago

You should be FAR more worried about PFAS, micro plastics, environmental estrogens, and their links to cancer.

However, DuPont, Dow, 3M, and BASF are very skilled at giving their poisons very innocuous names. Maybe viruses would be wise to have in-house PR teams as well…

tamaharbor• 4 years ago

Appropriately, 2022 is the Year of the Monkey.

benrapscallion• 4 years ago

Expert: Monkeypox likely spread by sex at 2 raves in Europe

[1] https://apnews.com/article/health-world-organization-united-...

Now Monkeypox

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