Will mpox become a global pandemic like covid-19?

[Lance]

A primer for Mpox .. I found this interesting since I didn’t know much about the latest warnings from the branch.

New Scientist Aug 31 2024..

 

A new variant of mpox is surging in Central Africa, raising concerns about how quickly it could spread further afield.

 

A new mpox variant called clade Ib that emerged in the Democratic Republic of the Congo last year has now spread to several neighbouring countries. Sweden and Thailand have also each detected a case in individuals who travelled from this region. So, how serious a threat is it?

It is clear that mpox clade Ib is nowhere near as transmissible as respiratory viruses such as SARS-CoV-2, and thus it almost certainly won’t cause a pandemic on the scale of covid-19. However, initial evidence suggests that clade Ib is significantly better at spreading from person to person than other mpox variants, such as clade IIb, which has caused nearly 100,000 reported infections worldwide since 2022.

Mpox, formerly known as monkeypox, normally infects rats and squirrels. There are two main types of mpox, clade I and clade II, with the former circulating in Central Africa and the latter in West Africa. These viruses occasionally spill into people, but the resulting outbreaks have usually been small and limited to households, because the virus isn’t good at spreading among people. Most infections involve close contact, including, but not limited to, sexual contact, says Susan Gould at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine in the UK.

People can also be infected by touching contaminated objects, such as bedding, but this is rarer. Gould detected the virus in air samples in one study, but this doesn’t mean it can spread via the air, she says. “There is no evidence of any cases where there’s airborne transmission.”

The ongoing outbreak of clade IIb, a type of mpox clade II, is the biggest and by far the most widespread, but it has been limited almost entirely to men who have sex with men. In Europe, 98 per cent of cases have been in men. Genetic studies revealed that IIb had been circulating in people for several years prior to its detection.

Now, Ib cases are surging. Reports state that Ib is even more transmissible than IIb, with signs of increased spread outside of households. However, because of limited testing, it is not clear how many of the 20,000 reported cases in all affected African countries so far this year are due to IIb.

Whether it really is more transmissible isn’t yet confirmed, says Brian Ferguson at the University of Cambridge. “There isn’t any hard evidence.” The picture will become clearer as any Ib outbreaks outside of endemic regions are studied.

In 2022, the expectation was that standard measures such as contact tracing would halt the spread of IIb, which turned out not to be the case. One reason for this may be that people infected with IIb can become infectious several days before showing symptoms or even without showing any symptoms at all. But offering vaccines to those at high risk has greatly reduced the virus’s spread in wealthier countries.

“They were highly effective,” says Paul Ananth Tambyah at the International Society for Infectious Diseases. “They brought down case numbers to really very low levels.”

It remains to be seen whether Ib can be contained by measures such as contact tracing, not least because we don’t know if it can spread before people show symptoms. It is possible that countries with effective healthcare systems will manage to contain outbreaks, but other nations may not. “There is a potential for that to happen,” says Ferguson.

If Ib does spread widely in some countries, there is also a risk of mpox becoming established in animal populations outside of West and Central Africa, which could lead to future outbreaks starting in non-endemic areas.

On the plus side, mpox evolves more slowly than viruses such as SARS-CoV-2. It is therefore thought to be very unlikely that it could evolve to evade existing vaccines. But Ferguson stresses that such conclusions are based on probability. “There’s a chance that it can change in a way that we can’t predict,” he says.

Assuming Ib doesn’t change much, vaccination campaigns should be able to bring any wider outbreaks under control. But vaccine availability is an issue and could become even more of a problem if Ib isn’t limited to a relatively small high-risk group, as with IIb.

Read more

 

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“There aren’t currently 10 million shots of vaccine available,” says Ferguson. That is the number estimated to be needed to halt the clade Ib outbreak just in Central Africa. Manufacturers are ramping up production but it will take time.

Because of limited testing and not all cases being reported, there is a lot of uncertainly about the fatality rate of Ib, with one report that the case fatality rate is as low as 0.6 per cent. In countries with better healthcare systems, it could be even lower, as with IIb.

Tambyah thinks Ib will behave similarly to IIb, but it is unlikely to spread to the same extent if countries act quickly, given that they have dealt with mpox before and people may have someimmunity. But if nothing is done to stop mpox outbreaks in West and Central Africa, more variants will emerge, he says. “And we’ll go through this whole cycle all over again.”

 

[carlos]

I'm quite convinced that monkey pox will not become a pandemic. Aside from the way it's transmitted, the reason is worldwide vaccination.

 

Between the 1960s and 1980s there were worldwide campaigns to vaccinate everybody against smallpox, which used to cause millions of deaths every year. As a result of those campaigns, smallpox was eradicated in the world. Fortunately that vaccine provides immunity against monkey pox too. That means that most of the world population above 40 years old or so is already immune to smallpox. That includes the elderly, which are usually the most vulnerable individuals during a pandemic.

 

In case monkey pox becomes a threat, there is already a vaccine that, in contrast with covid, has been thoroughly tested and works fine. So the situation is very different from the one we had with covid.

[Katty]

Like HIV/AIDs, it looks like there is still a consensus that MPox is a bloodborne or sexually transmitted disease. 
This is something that has been irritating me about the medical community and this concept of "public health". They seem to be repeatedly promoting the idea that individual choices don't make the slightest bit of difference and EVERYONE is at the exact same level of risk of particular diseases no matter what they do, and I think this idea is especially being pushed when particular sexual practices of particular kinds of people that are often considered a "protected class" in the West tends to be the most common way a disease is spread. 
I promise I'm not being paranoid nor exaggeratory when I say that the western world is definitely promoting the idea that all morality, particularly sexual morality is exactly the same and will result in the exact same results, and that this idea is even being aggressively pushed onto our children. I always rummage through the children's section of our local library as I think every parent should these days, and I saw book aimed at 5 year olds, talking about sex, presenting all the different kinds of sexualities as being the same and that it doesn't matter. Before someone tries to imply that I'm being bigoted for objecting to this idea, I just want to state that the whole point of serving Jehovah is based in the idea that we believe his morality is good and right, and the world's morality is wrong and bad, and that, therefore, this idea is an outright lie that we reject on a daily basis. 
Why am I bringing this up? Because I'm convinced that the desire to present all moralities and lifestyle choices as being equal is a major motivator in organizations such as the WHO, which, by the way is a part of the Scarlet Coloured Wild Beast in Revelation, as presenting a one size fits all solution that is touted as being equally effective or equally necessary to all parties no matter what they do and no matter how they live their lives. 

Just wanted to add that MPox is exploding in the same regions of the world that has been struggling with the HIV/AIDs epidemic since the 1980's as well as among the exact same demographics of people in the West; it also seems to be undergoing the same level of fearmongering that was presented with the HIV/AIDs epidemic, which led to the abject discrimination of, not only homosexuals, but just people who contracted the disease in ways they couldn't necessarily control (yes, sometimes it was blood transfusions, but I'm sure in the 1980's is was much more difficult to refuse a blood transfusion if you didn't have a medical document the way the Witnesses do). I don't believe a lot of the speculation on it. 

Edited October 2 by Katty

[Mike047]

Good points, Katty. Originally AIDS was called GRID - Gay Related Immune Deficiency - because it was thought to be linked only to homosexuals. When it was discovered that  it had a wider effect, and related to other aspects of life it was renamed AIDS. 

[Osprey]

Oh I didn't know about GRID. It is very illustrative how much times changed. It was official name, but imagine someone naming disease like this today. Not possible. Not even remote! Or you could go to prison.

[Brandon]

6 hours ago, Katty said:

I think this idea is especially being pushed when particular sexual practices of particular kinds of people that are often considered a "protected class"

we are all adults, you can write anal sex 

[fix it shop]

14 minutes ago, Brandon said:

we are all adults, you can write anal sex 

   " Am I finding this offensive ? "

[Brandon]

@WD-40 who are you quoting with those  “ ”  marks?

[fix it shop]

1 minute ago, Brandon said:

@WD-40 who are you quoting with those  “ ”  marks?

Whoever use the two words - the words are offerance.