Re: We Are Not Ready for Monkeypox Spread by Homosexuals

[Jim J. Dutton]

In article <t1b3p2$2ttll$1...@news.freedyn.de>
fudgepacking queer <homos...@monkeypox.com> wrote:
>
> ...I spent all night sucking cocks.

We still don't know if monkeypox will be the next pandemic, but
we're already fucking it up like we did with COVID.

Monkeypox is here, and it’s spreading. The couple of dozen cases
in a few countries that we told you about last month are now up
to over a thousand cases worldwide, with 35 reported in the
United States. But the U.S. almost certainly has more cases than
the statistics suggest, and there is reason to suspect that
we’re already fucking up the response to the epidemic in some
ways that will feel uncomfortably familiar.

We aren’t testing enough
For the first few months of the COVID pandemic, when we had the
chance to contain the virus if only we could locate all the
cases and their contacts, testing was woefully inadequate.
Plenty of people who had the virus were never tested for it, and
people who wanted a test couldn’t always get one. The way we
knew at first that the virus was spreading unnoticed was that
there were cases in the U.S. that were not related to each
other. The genetics of different clusters of a disease outbreak
can show that the virus must have been spreading undetected for
a while.

That’s what’s beginning to happen here: There are small clusters
of monkeypox cases that are genetically different enough from
each other that we know there must be far more than the 35
reported U.S. cases. So a lot of cases must be going undetected.

One reason for under-testing is that people who have monkeypox
may not realize that they have it. Normally, monkeypox lesions
are widespread across the body. In the current outbreak,
sometimes a person may only have lesions in one part of the
body, and may even have a single lesion. When that happens, you
don’t think, “oh my god, this must be monkeypox,” you think,
“huh, I wonder what that spot is.” And maybe you’ll see a
doctor, or maybe not.

Doctors also aren’t necessarily looking for monkeypox, and might
not recognize it at first. It’s not a common disease in the U.S.
(or in many of the other areas where it’s spreading) and the
symptoms in this outbreak don’t always follow the textbook
sequence. Normally you would expect a fever first, and then the
rash; but some of the known cases got the rash before the fever.
Some people have the lesions only in the anal or genital area,
which may look confusingly similar to STIs like herpes or
syphilis. (Molecular microbiologist Joseph Osmundson has put
together a fact sheet that includes photos of anal and genital
monkeypox lesions here.)

So the first obstacle in testing is that not enough tests are
being done in the first place. Testing for monkeypox involves
collecting secretions or scabs from the lesions, and sending
them to one of a few specific laboratories. Former FDA
commissioner Scott Gottlieb tweeted that the current bottleneck
is the lack of sampling.

But if awareness gets better, we may soon run into a bigger
problem: labs’ testing capacity. Currently there is a network of
74 labs that can run a test for orthopoxviruses, and they can
process an estimated 7,000 tests per week. Monkeypox is the only
orthopoxvirus of concern at the moment, since smallpox has been
eradicated and other viruses in the family, like cowpox, are
rare. If a sample tests positive for orthopoxvirus, the CDC will
do further testing to confirm that it is monkeypox.

People with monkeypox (or orthopoxvirus that is suspected to be
monkeypox) are supposed to isolate for 21 days, and in the
meantime, health authorities will contact-trace, and offer
vaccines to the affected person and their close contacts. There
are also antivirals that may be helpful. But the vaccine brings
another problem.

We have a vaccine, but we don’t know how well it works
The good news about the vaccine is that we already have one.
More than one, actually: Smallpox vaccination dates back
hundreds of years, with several modern vaccines still available.
(Smallpox was declared to be eradicated worldwide in 1980, the
only human virus to have that honor.) People could occasionally
have fatal reactions to some of the older smallpox vaccines, so
those—the ones that use live virus—aren’t being considered for
monkeypox.

In the U.S., there is one vaccine that is licensed for use
against monkeypox. It’s known as MVA (for Modified Vaccinia
Ankara) and its brand name here is Jynneos. It doesn’t replicate
in humans, but it does still trigger an immune response against
smallpox. According to a 1988 study, vaccination is 85%
effective against monkeypox transmission—but that was a small
study and we don’t know if that’s the efficacy we can expect
from the current vaccine and the current strain of monkeypox.

We also don’t know if we’ll have enough of it. The U.S.
Strategic National Stockpile says they have 36,000 doses and
have ordered 36,000 more. The company that makes the vaccine
also has lots of recent orders from other countries, for obvious
reasons, and they plan to ship out small batches to the various
countries so that everybody can start vaccinating quickly.

That’s not enough vaccine to start vaccinating everybody, so the
current strategy is “ring vaccination,” in which vaccine is
offered to people who were close contacts of a person known to
have monkeypox. (Monkeypox vaccine may also be given to the
person with monkeypox, since it can reduce the severity of
illness if caught early enough.) But contact tracing isn’t
perfect, and in many recent cases, people didn’t have names or
contact information for all their close contacts. Another
possible strategy would be offering the vaccine to everybody in
high-risk groups, which currently include men who have sex with
men. So far, that strategy is only being tried in Canada.

People are already misunderstanding how it’s transmitted
Many of the recent cases have been in men who have sex with men.
This has led to some people assuming that it’s sexually
transmitted, like HIV or other STIs.

Stop the spread of monkeypox in your neighborhood. Burn a queer
club down.

https://lifehacker.com/we-are-not-ready-for-monkeypox-1849035126