CDC Warns of More Infectious Monkeypox Strain with Higher Fatality Rate
Like the “classic” monkeypox, the new strain is spread through sexual contact.
The last time we reported on the disease formerly known as monkeypox, before its woke rebranding as Mpox, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was monitoring for a potential surge in the summer of 2023.
Between the use of vaccine appropriate for the monkeypox virus, and an infection control campaign targeting the at risk population (homosexual men), the surge did not occur.
However, the CDC is now warning of a more infectious strain.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) warned that a more infectious mpox virus strain has been found in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The CDC said the new strain, Clade I MPXV, has not been detected in the United States, but clinicians should be aware of the strain for people who have traveled to Congo.
The agency issued a travel health notice to people traveling to the DRC and said that people who recently traveled there should seek medical care if they develop a “new, unexplained skin rash,” or lesions, with or without fever and chills.
Like the “classic” monkeypox, the new strain is also spread through sexual contact.
Testing in the DRC has shown for the first time that Clade I mpox is being spread via sexual contact — the same way mpox spread last year.
Patients are suffering from flu-like symptoms, pus-filled skin lesions and more severe rashes, doctors say.
A case was also detected in a Belgian man last month who had recently traveled to the DRC.
The individual was described as someone who ‘has sexual relations with other men’ and who confirmed visiting undergound clubs for gay and bisexual men in the country.
There are no direct flights between Kinshasa, the capital of the DRC, and the US — although it is possible to reach the country via Paris or Brussels.
The numbers coming from the DRC are troubling, especially if Clade I is more infectious.
There have been 12,569 suspected mpox cases reported in the DRC this year so far, according to the CDC. It is the nation’s largest-ever outbreak and the figure is a marked increase from the median of 3,767 suspected cases a year during 2016 to 2021.
While genetic testing is not conducted on all suspected mpox cases—hence “suspected cases,” which is based on clinical presentation—cases where testing has been conducted has “confirmed” the clade I, the CDC said. Estimates suggest there have been nearly 600 mpox deaths in the DRC this year, roughly 5% of the suspected cases.
The virus has also been detected in more regions of the country than it has before, found to be transmitting in new ways and also spreading in previously spared urban areas like Kinshasa, the WHO reported. It concluded that the outbreak serves to “clearly illustrate the epidemiology of mpox in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is changing.”
The infection fatality rate for Clade I is also reported to be higher.
Now authorities have confirmed sexual spread of clade 1 in Congo in at least two dozen cases; clade 1 has a higher fatality rate than the version that spread internationally last year. A cluster of several cases in people who had sex with an mpox patient has caught attention, as has an unconnected case involving a man who has sex with other men and an outbreak that includes 20 sex workers in an eastern province of Congo that had never reported mpox before.
The discoveries are concerning because sex has proved to be a far more efficient way for the virus to spread than other forms of skin-to-skin contact, animal bites and scratches, or consuming contaminated bushmeat. Nonsexual spread had accounted for most transmissions in parts of Africa where the virus has circulated for decades.
“Pride Month” begins again in six months, with its associated “parades.” We will see then if the public health professionals do anything meaningful in disease prevention, or if they are too afraid of offending and naming things as they should be named in accordance with science, reality, and common sense.
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Comments
The Gorillapox is coming!!
Godzillapox?
Some people really should keep both their pants and zippers up. After AIDs one would think they should know better.
Maybe those at risk should be outfitted with something similar to metal Chasity belts?
Lockdowns for at risk populations in … 3 … 2 ….1 … 1/2 … 1/5 … 1/10 …
I’ll take the fifth! (hic). Diwntick unintended.
Of course not. Like every other government safety program, the lockdowns will be only for the uninvolved and innocent.
We may have found an industry that Africa is actually better at than China.
Remember that time monkeypox went away immediately after it came out that it is essentially an STD and a bunch of dogs and adopted kids caught it? Wild times.
And they could never figure out how that happened.. still wondering
It’s almost like someone taught the monkeypox virus to scream “Allahu Akbar!”
I am at Collection of Dumb … and just haven’t come up with the perfect ending “C.” Lots of easy choices.
The answer is simple. We know what causes it so don’t do that
Its only gay male disease right?
I would not bet on it only being a gay male disease, back when aids started I expressed concern that it would spread, some people though I was gay, that was not the case, and my concern was well justified. The same applies here.
AIDs never spread to the heterosexual community. The only heterosexuals who got AIDs were intravenous drugs users (addicts, hemophiliacs, etc.) and heterosexuals who had anal sex with bi partners.
Don’t you remember the big joke that was going around in the very beginning:
What’s the hardest part about getting AIDs?
Convincing your mother that you’re Haitian.
In fact, back then, the doctors were completely shocked (and disappointed, a lot – like Fauci) that the Times Square hookers weren’t getting AIDs like crazy. There was almost none of it among them for a very long time. SO it was mostly ignored.
Women all over Africa were dying of aids
By the tens of thousands and passing it on to their children…
Promiscuous sex with tons of partners is very common in Africa… for the men, of course
AIDs was rampant in Africa for the same reason that Haitians were among one of the at-risk groups in America in the beginning – because they practiced anal sex at a high rate among the heterosexual community. That was the key to propagating the disease, sexually.
Probably ten or more years ago I read comments by a female American aid worker. She was in he 20s, and described sexual practices. She was talking about Muslim men being married to 4 women, not doing much to help the women, and banking pretty much any willing woman. She also talked about the women offering sex to any man for a loaf of bread.
I have seen American blacks claiming that whites destroyed black family units. The truth is that Africa does not have very strong family units, and Islam condones that.
The S in AIDS is capitalized.
And see Michael Fumento’s book The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS. Basically, when a man and woman have normal vaginal sex, and both are in reasonable health with no open sores in the genital area, the virus transmits from male to female but almost never female to male. Early in the crisis NYC used to investigate cases where a man claimed to have caught the virus from a woman, and in almost every single case they found that this wasn’t true, so the politicians ordered them to stop investigating.
African AIDS is different for many reasons. For one thing, people are in poor general health. And there’s a lot of anal sex.
But the main difference is that in Africa (at least back in the ’80s and ’90s) AIDS was not diagnosed as it is in the West, by testing for the virus, but rather by the symptoms. . So anything that looked like it might be AIDS was diagnosed as AIDS, even if there was no sign of HIV. Then there was the fact that there was plenty of aid money for AIDS, but not for many real and serious diseases that are rampant in Africa, so a lot of doctors were just diagnosing sick people with AIDS so they could get the treatment they actually needed, out of the AIDS budget. (This is all according to Fumento. I asked him a bunch of questions about this back around 2000 or thereabouts.)
What’chu talkin’ bout, Willis? Sure, there’s some percentage of outlier cases, mostly spread by bisexual men, but statistically, it’s close to a nothingburger. In fact, straight white males don’t even make an appearance on this chart.
“I would not bet on it only being a gay male disease, back when aids started I expressed concern that it would spread …”
I’d say it’s a pretty safe bet to avoid sexual contact with homosexual men and the women who have sex with them, and the monkeyaidspox would then be of no concern.
It’s the lying husbands that are the problem
I don’t know why we should trust the CDC, not after how politicized it has become and after it was so wrong about the Wu-flu.
Let’s review the bidding:
We gotta do “contact tracing” including vacuumed-up location data from your phone, because of a usually innocuous virus, casually transmitted. BUT, we can’t do “contact tracing” to wipe out permanently-contageous, debilitating, diseases you gotta be knocking boots to catch.
It’s like the point was vacuuming up all that data not stomping out diseases.
There’s a Heinlein quote, I think from To Sail Beyond the Sunset but I’m not sure, to the effect that the definition of a venereal disease is one that’s so difficult to catch that you actually have to have sex with a carrier in order to do so.
To increase awareness, the next president of UPenn should be drawn from the population of Congolese sex workers.
Who is patient zero who had sex with monkey?
Doug Emhoff
I believe that the patient zero scenario actually arises from eating the infected monkey (“bush meat”). From then on, it shows up among humans only as an STD, because humans don’t eat humans, so that vector never shows up as an infection risk.
I’m sure we will be expected to spend billions on a cure rather than tell people “don’t do that.” This an akin to stacking mattresses all around your house instead of saying “if you jump off the roof you might die.”
Made in Fauci’s latest secret lab?