Illinois Daycare Worker Tests Positive for Monkeypox

Illinois Daycare Worker Tests Positive for Monkeypox

Reports indicate an Illinois daycare worker with monkeypox might have exposed children under his care.

The case was reported in Rontoul, a village in Champaign County in central Illinois, health officials said.

The number of children possibly exposed wasn’t clear, but officials said that no other people related to the center have tested positive.

tate health director Sameer Vohra said it takes close, personal and sometimes prolonged contact to contract the virus.

“The monkeypox virus is not an airborne virus,” he said.

Though the vaccine is not typically available to children, the Food and Drug Administration is allowing vaccination for those younger than 18 in cases where they may have been exposed to the virus, Vohra said.

Currently, there are no reports of any children infected with monkeypox. However, some in the press are using this incident to push the narrative that anyone can get monkeypox.

“It was only a mater of time” before monkeypox made it to congregate settings, a pediatric infectious disease specialist told Fortune, after Illinois state officials announced Friday that a daycare worker had been diagnosed with the smallpox-related virus.

“There is definitely potential for spread of monkeypox” in daycares, schools, college campuses, prisons, and other similar settings, said Dr. Alexandra Brugler Yonts, an infectious disease specialist at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C. She assisted in the FDA’s review of Jynneos—one of two smallpox vaccines licensed for treatment of monkeypox, and the safer of the two by far.

“Anywhere that close physical, skin-to-skin contact occurs—particularly of people who are in various stages of undress—there is risk,” she said.

Here is hoping the virus doesn’t morph into something substantially more transmissible than appears to be the case at present.

Meanwhile, the government is trying to find a way to stretch the supply of the monkeypox vaccine by changing how the doses are administered to people.

Legal Insurrection readers probably won’t be surprised to learn this particular supply problem is a result of government ineptitude.

Stretching out doses of the vaccine, Jynneos, could help the federal government resolve a predicament partly of its own making. Even though it invested more than $1 billion developing the two-dose vaccine to use against both monkeypox and smallpox, the government only has 1.1 million shots on hand, partly because it was slow to order bulk vaccine stocks to be processed into vials.

That supply is enough to cover 550,000 people, but about three times as many doses are needed to cover the 1.6 million to 1.7 million Americans who, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, are at high risk of monkeypox. For now, the virus has been spreading primarily through skin-to-skin contact during sex among gay and bisexual men, the C.D.C. has said.

Some federal officials are hoping that by injecting a smaller dose of the vaccine between skin layers, called an intradermal shot, the Biden administration could tamp down the outbreak before it spreads more widely.

But some experts argue that this approach has not been sufficiently studied. They also warn that some vaccinators will need training to properly deliver the shots, which could slow vaccination efforts. Otherwise, the government could end up wasting doses, not saving them.

Over/under on whether the monkeypox outbreak will be more incompetently handled than covid? It seems like it would be difficult to exceed the bureaucratic boobery we saw with covid, but if any administration can do it, it would undoubtedly be the one “headed” by Biden.

Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.