Denthusiasm about monkey pox Meanwhile, the infection rate is falling. But the outbreak is not over yet. Since the start of the year, 109 countries have reported more than 78,000 cases and Germany is now sixth on the list with nearly 3,670 infections, ahead of Peru and Colombia, followed by the US and Brazil (28,650 and 9,260 cases) and Spain. are ahead of. , France and Great Britain are headed. One current study The “British Medical Journal” now also provides new evidence for the suspicion that affected people are contagious even before they first show symptoms, which would explain the dynamics that occurred globally.
There was an outbreak seen since May World Health Organization as a “health emergency with international impact” on July 23, 2022, when numbers rose sharply – in countries where the pathogen is not yet endemic but may well be. For the British study, 2,746 patients who proved infected were questioned in detail, evaluating contact data and taking into account the course of the disease in Great Britain, where the epidemic peaked on 9 July.
The team, led by Thomas Ward and Christopher Overton of the UK Health Protection Agency, used a variety of model calculations to statistically evaluate the data. The results suggest an average incubation time of 7.6 or 7.8 days (ranging from 6.5 to 9.9 days) and a relatively long infectious phase before symptoms are noticed. An isolation period of 16 to 23 days after contact would be necessary to trace and protect 95 per cent of those infected. The fact that infected people had apparently already transmitted the virus to others before symptoms appeared was indicated by the strikingly short “serial lag” until the respective contact individuals were also symptomatic. .
In Germany, the number of weekly replies Robert Koch Institute (RKI) has been declining in Berlin since August, and October saw fewer than 20 cases per week. The RKI continues to under-evaluate the risk to the health of the general population in Germany. In this outbreak, transmission is mainly through close physical contact, mostly in the context of sexual activity, especially among men who have had sexual contact with other men. So far, only 19 cases involving women have been reported, with three cases involving male adolescents and two cases involving children below 14 years of age. For example, in Great Britain the average age of affected people is 37, while in Africa’s endemic countries, earlier outbreaks mostly affected young people: in 2016 the average age of those infected in the Democratic Republic was ten years. In 2020, 58 percent of those affected were not yet six years old.
more breakouts and they get bigger
However, scientists told the annual meeting of the “American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene” on Thursday that significantly more people are infected with monkeypox than previously thought. This is indicated by the analysis of samples from a remote area in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. And it probably won’t take long for such small local outbreaks to develop into large epidemics. There was also evidence that, among other things, there was a virus strain circulating that led to a more severe course than the one currently prevalent around the world.
Researchers from the American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Kinshasa School of Public Health and the Congolese Ministry of Public Health reported on data on 1,463 confirmed and confirmed cases in Tsupa province between 2013 and 2017. is based. in the laboratory. They determined the relative number of breeding, the R value, which in the region has increased from 0.3 to 0.5 in the 1980s to 0.81. The probability of a major explosion is becoming more and more.
Researchers also believe that “spillovers” occur regularly and more frequently. People become infected with rodents, which are thought to be a natural reservoir for these pathogens. It is usually children who are at the beginning of the infection chain and then in turn infect other members of their family. CDC epidemiologist Kelly Charniga, who specializes in infectious diseases, warns that the more often this happens, the more likely the pathogen will eventually spread through person-to-person transmission alone. More attention and support should now be given to the areas that are most affected by infectious disease today. Where people are most at risk of getting infected with monkeypox and sometimes dying. This is “the best way to prevent monkeypox from causing more outbreaks in the Democratic Republic of the Congo – and from becoming a major global problem.”
