Monkey Pox

[Nemo]

as they call it.  Dusted around on international flights.

I tell ya, the world is going to hell in a high powered handbasket.

Friends close, rifle closer and don't fly anywhere.

Nemo

https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/world-news/733054/terror-isis-plague-black-death-monkeypox-cholera-ebola-spread-symptoms

Plane PLAGUE could be WEAPONISED by terrorists 'very quickly': 'It's the Holy Grail'

TERRORISTS could weaponise highly infectious diseases to infect civilian populations across borders “very quickly”, an expert has revealed to Daily Star Online.
By Martin Coulter / Published 29th September 2018

The warning comes as the US published its new bio-defence policy in an attempt to protect against the threat of bio-chemical weapons and outbreaks of infectious disease.

In the last six months alone, Zimbabwe has been hit by a wave of cholera, the DRC has seen a fresh outbreak of Ebola, and the Black Death has returned to Madagascar.

And earlier this week the first ever Brit to be infected by monkeypox revealed her fears she may have passed on the deadly virus to her husband.

Professor Wyn Rees, a security expert at the University of Nottingham, told Daily Star Online that spreading diseases via commercial planes was the “Holy Grail” of terror.

.   .   .




Long article, click above to read it all.

 

[Kbop]

yeah, and in that game Madagascar is the hardest place to get to. 
'Globalization' makes airliners a fast way to transmit disease.

i've always wondered what would happen if you just shipped it from DHl, FedEx, UPS, et.sl.  and sent it to every large office building as a free 'skin care' sample pack, with hand lotion, scented hand sanitizer, suntan lotion, lip balm.  wait a few days and it would crop up everywhere at once and in several strains all at once.
it would solve the distribution problem and keeping the bug alive for long enough problem and if you make the mix mildly smelly - one person won't keep it, they'll pass it or sell it on.

i got the idea from a combination of an old Batman movie and the repeated salad contamination issues in the US of A.  We can't stop a simple norovirus or simple common baculus.  what happens when someone actually tries?  You don't even want to kill everyone - just make them invalids afterwards.  I mean, what would happen if 2/3 of the population suddenly needed liver of kidney transplants all at once.  the care burden would shut down commerce. 

[JohnyMac]

Matt Bracken was put into FaceBook Solitary Confinement for 30 days as posted about the Monley Pox. 

[Nemo]

And Guess What?

Nemo

https://www.foxnews.com/world/monkeypox-moderate-risk-global-public-health-who

Coronavirus
Published May 30, 2022 12:45pm EDT
Monkeypox presents moderate risk to global public health, WHO says
Monkeypox virus is related to smallpox

The World Health Organization (WHO) called monkeypox a "moderate threat" to worldwide public health.

In a report issued Sunday, the WHO gave a breakdown of the monkeypox virus' side effects, transmissibility and its presence in countries worldwide.

As of May 26, only 257 cases had been tested in laboratories and documented worldwide, with an additional 120 suspected cases without lab confirmation.

"Currently, the overall public health risk at global level is assessed as moderate considering this is the first time that monkeypox cases and clusters are reported concurrently in widely disparate WHO geographical areas, and without known epidemiological links to non-endemic countries in West or Central Africa," the WHO stated.

"The situation is evolving rapidly and WHO expects that there will be more cases identified as surveillance expands in non-endemic countries, as well as in countries known to be endemic who have not recently been reporting cases," the agency said.

Data indicates that the monkeypox virus is not as transmittable as the coronavirus has been in the past years of the global pandemic. Transmission of monkeypox typically requires skin-to-skin contact, sharing of bodily fluids and other forms of direct contact.

Though the virus is not exclusively transmitted via sex between men, outbreaks of monkeypox have been clustered in LGBTQ communities. The WHO has provided specialized advice on the virus for these groups.
This 1997 image provided by the CDC during an investigation into an outbreak of monkeypox, which took place in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), formerly Zaire, and depicts the dorsal surfaces of the hands of a monkeypox case patient, who was displaying the appearance of the characteristic rash during its recuperative stage.

"One reason we are currently hearing reports of cases of monkeypox from sexual health clinics in communities of men who have sex with men in this outbreak may be because of positive health seeking behaviour in this demographic," the WHO wrote in their report. "Monkeypox rashes can resemble some sexually transmitted diseases, including herpes and syphilis, which may explain why these cases are being picked up at sexual health clinics. It is likely that as we learn more, we may identify cases in the broader community."

Around 20 countries where monkeypox is not endemic have reported outbreaks of the viral disease, with more than 200 confirmed or suspected infections mostly in Europe.

The name "monkeypox" reflects the first documentation of the virus, which was in species of monkeys in Denmark in 1958.

"One case of monkeypox in a non-endemic country is considered an outbreak. The sudden appearance of monkeypox simultaneously in several non-endemic countries suggests that there may have been undetected transmission for some time as well as recent amplifying events."

Mexico on Saturday reported its first confirmed case of monkeypox, according to deputy health secretary Hugo Lopez-Gatell.

The patient was a 50-year-old permanent resident of New York who is being treated in Mexico City, Lopez-Gatell said on Twitter.

Reuters contributed to this report.

[Nemo]

Chicken or Monkey?

Nemo


https://www.the-sun.com/health/5451206/tell-difference-between-chickenpox-monkeypox/

[Nemo]

Its near a pandemic.  Get in line, get your shots, mail in ballots, drop off lines, send 'em in by neighborhood courier come November.

Lockdown everything, CDC makes the rules, guns are bad, Biden will cure it, you shut up.

Nemo

Note Added Bold Below

https://www.thedailybeast.com/shocking-monkeypox-screw-up-means-we-need-to-admit-we-now-face-two-pandemics

Shocking Monkeypox Screw-Up Means We Need to Admit We Now Face Two Pandemics
BLOWN IT

We?ve already let monkeypox spiral out of control. In order to prevent millions of infections, it is time to admit this is another pandemic.
David Axe
Updated Jul. 16, 2022 2:15AM ET / Published Jul. 15, 2022 11:06PM ET


We blew our chance to quickly contain monkeypox. Now the dangerous virus is spreading fast all over the world.

Health experts agree: the outbreak could soon qualify as a pandemic, if it doesn?t already. And the situation is likely to get worse before it gets better. More infections, more deaths, more chances for the pox to mutate.

?We are in uncharted territory with this outbreak? and still early in the event,? James Lawler, an infectious disease expert and a colleague of Wiley at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, told The Daily Beast.

The latest figures from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control are startling. The CDC tallied 9,647 infections as of July 11. That?s a fourfold increase compared to just a month ago.
?It is shocking after all we learned with COVID-19, we have let another virus escalate to this point. ?
? Lawrence Gostin, Georgetown University

The virus, which causes a rash and fever and can be fatal in a very small percentage of cases, is in 63 countries?57 of which don?t usually have any monkeypox cases.

Cases are concentrated in West and Central Africa?where the virus is endemic?as well as in Europe, where the current outbreak began in May. But the U.S. is logging a startling number of cases, as well: 865 in 39 states, according to the CDC. That?s five times as many as a month ago.

?Monkeypox is clearly a global health emergency,? Lawrence Gostin, a Georgetown University global-health expert, told The Daily Beast. ?It has simmered in small pockets in Central and West Africa for decades, but until now there have been no cases unrelated to travel in the rest of the world. Now it is in virtually every region of the world and spreading rapidly.?

The death rate, mercifully, is still low. As of July 4, the most recent date for which figures are available, the World Health Organization had recorded just three deaths in the current outbreak.

Three out of 9,647?or .03 percent?is a much lower death rate than West and Central African countries apparently suffered in their own pox outbreaks in recent decades. The worst African outbreaks, involving a strain of the virus that?s endemic to the Congo River Basin in Central Africa, have resulted in official death rates as high as 10 percent.

But the more viruses spread, the more they mutate?often in ways that make them deadlier. As long as monkeypox spreads faster than health authorities can contain it, the greater the risk it?s going to spawn new, more dangerous variants, potentially driving up the death toll.

Monkeypox mostly spreads through close physical contact, especially sexual contact. It?s not a sexually transmitted disease, however. It just takes advantage of the skin-to-skin contact that accompanies sex. The virus can also travel short distances on spittle, although probably not far enough to qualify as ?airborne.?

Officials first noticed the current outbreak, involving a relatively mild West African strain of the pox, after diagnosing a U.K. traveler returning from Nigeria in early May. Hitching a ride to Europe, the virus spread quickly through physical contact.

David Heymann, who formerly headed the WHO?s emergencies department, said that men attending raves in Spain and Belgium ?amplified? the outbreak?apparently through close, sometimes sexual, contact with other men.

After that, the virus accompanied travelers on planes heading for countries far and wide. Doctors diagnosed the first U.S. case on May 27.

But it?s apparent now that the first diagnosed pox cases in Europe and the U.S. weren?t the real first cases. On June 3, the CDC announced it had found genetic evidence of U.S. pox cases that predated the first cases in Europe from May.

Doctors may not have noticed or reported these earlier cases, at first, owing to the similarity between pox symptoms and the symptoms of some common sexually transmitted diseases such as herpes. In other words, the current outbreak began, and expanded, without anyone noticing at first.

The virus had a big head start, which helps to explain why, months later, it still has the advantage. ?By the time we recognized that cases were happening, we were already behind,? Lawler said.

Prompt diagnosis is the key to containing a dangerous virus quickly. If officials know where the virus is concentrated in the early days of an outbreak, they can isolate infected people, conduct contact-tracing to identify vulnerable populations and deploy therapies and vaccines and to treat the infected and protect the uninfected. (Lucky for us, widely available smallpox vaccines work just fine against monkeypox.)

With its likeliest infection vectors cut off by early intervention, the virus withers and disappears?before it can mutate into some new variant that might, say, be more contagious or even evade vaccines.

That?s what should have happened back in April or even earlier, but didn?t because the WHO, CDC and other health organizations didn?t even know a pox outbreak was happening. The current, rapid spread is the consequence of that initial failure.

The worst outcome isn?t hard to imagine?10,000 cases could quickly bloom into 100,000 cases. Then 1 million. Various experts and agencies disagree over the precise definition of ?pandemic,? but if the pox outbreak doesn?t already qualify, it?s increasingly likely that it will in the weeks to come. At that point, the world will be contending with simultaneous pandemics.

The WHO for one has studiously avoided using the p-word to describe the pox outbreak. The CDC did not immediately respond to a query

This is a mistake, Lawler said. ?We certainly cannot make ?pandemic? declarations about every disease outbreak that crosses multiple international borders without becoming the boy who cries wolf,? he conceded.

But, he added, ?I would argue that we should have learned some humility in the face of emerging viruses by now.? If the word ?pandemic? gets people?s attention and underscores the growing risk?use it.

The silver lining is the very low death rate in the current pox outbreak. That could be a statistical anomaly resulting from a huge overcount of deaths in earlier African outbreaks. ?I am not sure we have a full grasp of the denominator of cases that actually occur in West Africa,? Lawler pointed out. Meaning, it?s possible that pox deaths in Africa were spread out across a much bigger number of infections than we realized at the time.

It?s also possible we?re seeing a happy side-effect of a pox outbreak mostly affecting richer communities. ?Monkeypox is now being diagnosed in urban populations where more people have access to health-care facilities,? Blossom Damania, a virologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told The Daily Beast.

Either way, we shouldn?t get complacent. The pox, like all viruses, treats every infected person like a laboratory. A chance to try new things, learn and change. Every additional infection increases the likelihood of new variants emerging. As COVID has repeatedly demonstrated, new variants mean new risks. Greater transmissibility, severity or vaccine-evasion?or a mix of all three.

There?s still time to prevent the worst-case scenario of millions of cases and potentially thousands of deaths. The WHO, CDC and other health bodies must double down on efforts to educate doctors and speed up diagnoses?and then move more quickly to isolate and treat infected people and vaccinate those around them. ?If we can get enough vaccine into high-risk contacts, this will cease,? Amesh Adalja, a public-health expert at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told The Daily Beast.

COVID reminded us how bad a viral outbreak can get. Then monkeypox came around to remind us of our strong tendency toward complacency, even amid an ongoing health crisis. ?It is shocking that, after all we have learned with COVID-19, we have let another virus escalate to the point of becoming a global health emergency,? Gostin said.

To catch up with the fast-moving pox, what we need now?more than anything?is a fresh sense of urgency.

[Jackalope]

    There are 4 or 5 cases in Nashville, according to the local press.  Three or four of the cases were from patients that had been out of the U.S., nice of them to bring it back with them.  What ever happened to quarantine?  I thought quarantine was one of the reasons behind Ellis Island.

[Felix]

"I thought quarantine was one of the reasons behind Ellis Island."

   Understanding Ellis Island the way you do, Jackalope?
Completely understandable.   Poor, benighted clinger...

Had you the advantage of a more modern edumacation, the mere existence of an "Ellis Island" would have tripped the "RACIST" alarm sensors immediately.

But now.  If you would... please keep your hands and feet inside the ride at all times, socially distance appropriately and mask up if in any doubt whatsoever.