Monkeypox is nothing to worry about and outbreaks will be in the hundreds rather than thousands of cases unlike Covid, a top doctor says.
Former deputy chief medical officer Nick Coatsworth said monkeypox was not a novel virus, meaning newly-discovered, and there is already an effective vaccine.
The World Health Organisation has confirmed 92 cases and 28 suspected cases of monkeypox in non-African countries, where it is endemic – meaning widespread – in some nations, including two in Australia.
Monkeypox symptoms include, fever, body aches, chills, fatigue and after one to three days infected people may also develop a rash and fluid-filled lesions (pictured)
But Dr Coatsworth said there was no cause for panic and the outbreak wouldn’t blow up into a pandemic, which is when an epidemic occurs worldwide.
‘We know about monkeypox, it’s been endemic in West Africa and the Congo region of Africa,’ Mr Coatsworth told the Today show on Tuesday.
‘We know a couple of things: we know that the largest outbreaks in the past decades have been in the hundreds – not the thousands.
‘It’s not, in my view, going to move towards the same sort of whole nation epidemic that we saw with Covid-19.’
It is also far less contagious, and also has no evidence of long-term effects, unlike Covid which has been shown to affect 1 in 3 people far beyond their initial infection and even cause permanent damage to cells and organs.
Health officials were urged to keep a close watch for more cases at an emergency meeting convened by the WHO on Saturday, as the disease appeared to be spreading among people who had not traveled to Africa.
However, health officials also stressed the rise in cases did not look like the start of another pandemic as the virus needs close contact to spread.
The WHO identified the cases as belonging to the West African clade of monkeypox, which is relatively mild, compared to the more severe Congo Basin strain, which has a mortality rate of up to 10 per cent of cases.
Infectious Disease Physician Nick Coatsworth (pictured) told the Today Show on Tuesday that monkeypox is not a new virus and is unlikely to cause a national epidemic
Symptoms include fever, body aches, chills and fatigue. After one to three days, some people may also develop a ‘chickenpox-like’ rash and fluid-filled lesions on the face, arms and legs.
Mr Coatsworth said although monkeypox was a hard disease to transmit, health officials should still ‘treat it with respect’.
‘Three ways it can be transmitted: contact, droplet, and a small number of cases it be airborne,’ Mr Coatsworth said.
‘It is prolonged contact for monkeypox, it is not like the casual in the same room contact that you can get Covid-19.
‘So really it’s a harder disease to transmit… which is why I think we’ll have it contained.’
The virus is generally self-limiting, which means an infected person recovers within a few weeks without treatment when put in isolation.
Treatment for the rare viral infection includes the smallpox vaccine, which has been shown to be up to 85 per cent effective against monkeypox when administered up to four days after potential exposure.
Monkeypox was first identified by scientists in 1958 after discovering the disease in monkeys with the first human case identified in a child in the Congo in 1970.
The World Health Organisation has identified monkeypox in 14 different countries outside of Africa – where the disease is endemic
The disease is endemic in Central and West Africa – the recent outbreak was first confirmed in Europe on May 7 in someone who returned to England from Nigeria.
Infections have been reported across Britain, Italy, Portugal, Spain, France, Germany, Belgium, Sweden and the Netherlands with cases confirmed in the US, Canada, Israel, and Australia.
A 40-year-old Sydney man developed a mild illness several days after arriving home from the UK and his GP found the tell-tale monkeypox symptoms of blisters and rashes.
Another case in Victoria has also now been reported in a man in his 30s who had been on a trip to the UK and developed symptoms after his return on May 16.
Belgium was the first country to introduce a compulsory 21-day monkeypox quarantine after three cases were recorded in the country.
The infections, the first of which was recorded on Friday, are all linked to a festival in the port city of Antwerp.
The virus is transmitted from one person to another by close contact with lesions, body fluids, respiratory droplets and contaminated materials such as bedding – and may be sexually transmitted (pictured, a 2003 electron microscope image showing monkeypox virions)
The WHO said the virus is transmitted from one person to another by close contact with lesions, body fluids, respiratory droplets and contaminated materials such as bedding.
‘Cases have mainly but not exclusively been identified amongst men who have sex with men,’ it said.
Although a clear link between cases has yet to be made, transmission may have been going on for sometime with many cases identified at sexual health clinics where men sought help for lesions on their genitals.
WHO Strategic and Technical Advisory Group on Infectious Hazards with Pandemic and Epidemic Potential chairman David Heymann said the sexual transmission of monkeypox amplified its global spread.
‘What seems to be happening now is that it has got into the population as a sexual form, as a genital form, and is being spread, as are sexually transmitted infections, which has amplified its transmission around the world,’ he said.
No one has died of the viral disease to date.
