Health officials around the world warn that the monkeypox, usually found in parts of Africa, are spreading across the world. Cheddar News speaks with Dr. Amesh Adalja, Infectious Disease Specialist and Senior Scholar at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security about what people can do to best protect themselves. 



Cheddar's News Wrap

How to Protect Yourself From the Monkeypox

Welcome back to cheddar news wrap. Well, you might have thought you were finally catching a break from the covid 19 pandemic. Right, well there's a new virus in town. Taking over news feeds. Health officials say monkeypox has now been found in 12 countries around the world. Leaving the president weighing in from asia Take a listen. It is something that everybody should be concerned about it. We're working on it hard. Figure out what we do is what vaccine may be available for. Sure. That word has spread response. Alright, don't worry to answer all your questions about monkey pox. We are joined by dr a methodology to infectious disease specialist and senior scholar at john Hopkins University Center for Health Security. So doc, can you tell us more about what this virus is and what it does to the body? So monkey Pox is a virus that's been known to science since the 1950s or so and has been causing sporadic outbreaks in several countries in Africa for a long time. Occasionally we get imported cases into the United States we had to last year and we've also had a big outbreak in United States in 2003 linked to the importation of animals from Africa. It causes a fever and it causes a rash and swollen lymph nodes. And it's related to smallpox but much less serious than smallpox. So there's the third suspected case in the US at least in florida. But the EU is telling nations to buckle up and start making strategies. You're the doctor, you can weed through the headlines in the hysteria. How concerned should we be? The general public has nothing to fear from monkey box. It's not a virus that can cause a pandemic or a major uncontrolled outbreak. We've got tools that work the smallpox vaccine because these are related viruses will work. If we vaccinate contacts, it will stop transmission. It's happened time and time again. So what we have to do right now is understand the epidemiology and it seems to be spreading in gay and bisexual men. And we need to really stop that transmission chained by increasing awareness, increasing diagnosis, doing contact tracing and using the vaccine. So this is nothing to panic about. But we need to take the correct actions to be able to halt it. Does it have any similarities to Covid 19? Because I think we're all kind of stained with. If it's a virus, it's just like Covid. So does does it have any? No, almost none of these are totally different viruses, totally different viral families. Different transmission characteristics, different contagiousness, different tools. There's this tendency to look at everything through the eye of COVID-19 or through the lens of COVID-19. And that's wrong. And it really ignores the biology viruses are very different from each other and one virus can do something. Another virus can do something else. And and we've got to kind of combat that type of thinking because we want to address the virus for what it actually is and what the threat it poses, not the threat to COVID-19 poses. So it's been said that monkey pox is kind of like the cousin to smallpox. We all know about smallpox vaccines is their smallpox. You kind of mentioned that they're different viruses, but perhaps the smallpox vaccines also perhaps protect you a little bit from monkeypox or is a totally different thing. You have to get all together. Smallpox vaccines don't just protect you a little bit. They protect you a lot from monkeypox. That's how we've stopped outbreaks in the past. The one of the monkey one of the smallpox vaccine is actually FDA approved for the prevention of monkeypox as well because they're so closely related. So how do we get because as you know, all americans all across the States were lining up long around the block to get vaccines, but in reality they weren't. So how do we get people motivated to get vaccines when it comes to monkey pox? So we don't see a spread here in the US. We don't need to vaccinate the entire population for control of the monkey pox vaccine with monkeypox. We're not going to vaccinate everybody. The only people that are gonna get vaccinated are close contacts of cases because this virus has so many limitations to its spread. All you basically have to do is put a ring around it with vaccines to vaccinate the contacts of cases and then transmission stops. This is not a virus that's contagious during its incubation period. This has a long incubation period and we know that vaccinated, I think people after they've been exposed to monkeypox can abort or attenuate the infection. So that's the tried and true way of stopping these outbreaks. We just have to start doing it and we are starting to do it. Alright, perfect. Alright. I feel a lot better now. Doctor, a methodology infectious disease specialist and senior scholar at the JohNS Hopkins University Center of Health Security Doctor. Thank you as always for setting us straight.