New York, Oct. 1 (BUS): Some US health officials acknowledge that monkeypox likely won’t go away any time soon, the Associated Press (AP) reports.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the spread of the disease is slowing but the virus is so widespread that eradication is unlikely. That conclusion was in a recent report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, echoed Friday by Marc Lipsitch, director of science at the agency’s Center for Disease Prediction.
Lipsitch was reluctant to say monkeypox is permanent, but said it will be an ongoing threat in the next few years.
“It is present in many geographic locations within the country” as well as in other countries, Lipsitch told The Associated Press. “There is no clear path in our minds to complete the removal locally.”
The virus has mainly spread among gay and bisexual men, although health officials continue to stress that anyone can be infected. Lipsitch said it’s important that people at risk take steps to prevent the spread and that vaccination efforts continue.
The CDC report contained some good news: The outbreak in the United States appears to have peaked in early August. The average daily number of reported cases — less than 150 — is about a third of what was reported in midsummer, and officials expect the decline to continue for at least the next several weeks.
Lipsitch attributed the good news to increased vaccinations, cautious behavior by people at risk, and infection-derived immunity in high-risk populations.
Dr. Tom Inglesby, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, agreed that the spread of monkeypox in the United States was unlikely to stop any time soon, but said it was still possible in the long term.
If local transmission is stopped, he said, infection could persist if people contract the virus while traveling internationally. But the low cases make it sound as if we’ve “passed a real U-turn”.
“The ongoing efforts are successful and should continue, if not intense,” he said.
With the number of cases declining, he said, now is the time for local health departments to take a fresh stab at massive contact tracing to try to stop transmission chains.
Monkeypox is endemic to parts of Africa, where people became infected through bites from rodents or small animals, but it wasn’t considered a disease that spread easily between people until May, when infections emerged in Europe and the United States.
More than 67,000 cases have been reported in countries that historically have not had monkeypox. The United States has the largest number of infections of any country – more than 25,600. One American death was attributed to monkeypox.
More than 97% of cases in the United States are men. The vast majority of men who reported having had sexual contact with other men were recently.
Officials said that while cases have decreased, the proportion of new cases with information about recent sexual contact has also decreased. Lipsitch noted that this is increasing the blind spot about how the virus spreads.
AOQ