KEVON FELMINE
kevon.felmine@guardian.co.tt
While the re-emergence of Monkeypox worries a world already struggling with a pandemic, geneticist Dr Nicole Ramlachan says it is not another situation like COVID-19.
Speaking on CNC3’s The Morning Brew on Tuesday, Ramlachan said although there is now person-person transmission of the viral zoonosis infection, it is not as transmissible as COVID-19. She said there was no reason to sound the alarm yet here in T&T, as there are just a handful of patients in the 11 countries where health authorities detected the virus. However, she stressed that there are many unknowns about the virus, which seems to now present with a mutation.
She explained that Monkeypox was a DNA virus belonging to the poxviridae and is related to smallpox. However, it is not smallpox or the vaccinia virus from which scientists created the smallpox vaccine.
Known primarily in Africa, scientists discovered it in macaque laboratory monkeys in 1958. Like other zoonotic diseases like Ebola, HIV and coronavirus, the disease moves from animal to human via exposure to respiratory droplets and lesions.
Reports show that some people infected with Monkeypox had no travel history. Ramlachan said this indicates some mutations changed how the virus spreads.
Apart from respiratory droplets and lesion contact, she said there is a concern about it being a sexually transmitted disease. She said many cases globally and in the US are among the gay communities.
The good news is that vaccines were already available, as health authorities used the vaccinia vaccines to eradicate smallpox between the 1950s-1970s.
Ramlachan said limited vaccination usually defeats Monkeypox outbreaks, but there are concerns over the mutations that make it easily transmissible among people. Investigations are ongoing into why this is happening to determine how to control it.
“It is not fatal in the high amounts that smallpox is, it is a one per cent fatality, roughly mortality rate, so it still has the chance of being severe, but what they are seeing now is controllable. So what they do is what they call ring vaccination.
“Usually, when they identify somebody with it, they vaccinate their immediate contact in almost like a ring, so they complete that circle around that individual to provide coverage,” Ramlachan said.
Meanwhile, as the Ministry of Health rolls out COVID-19 vaccines to children between the ages of five to 11, Ramlachan said few adverse events had occurred in other countries that use the vaccines.
Although some children in the 12-18 age group developed pericarditis, this was not the case in the younger children.
Researchers believe there is a link between pericarditis and postpubertal males. But even in cases of pericarditis, she said doctors resolved them easily and there were no deaths.