- "...and because it is related to the smallpox virus, there are already treatments and vaccines on hand for curbing its spread"
- "As a precaution against bioterrorism, countries such as the United States maintain a supply of smallpox vaccines, as well as an antiviral treatment thought to be highly effective against the virus. The therapies probably wouldn’t be deployed on a large scale, though, McCollum says. Health-care workers would probably instead use a method called ‘ring vaccination’ to contain the spread of monkeypox: this would vaccinate the close contacts of people who have been infected with monkeypox to cut off any routes of transmission."
> Now, Jeffrey Langland at Arizona State University in Tempe, US, and colleagues have conducted in vitro experiments with the herbal extract and found it inhibits replication of the variola virus, the causative agent behind smallpox.
Fair to be skeptical, but "native Americans" represented a lot of people segregated by geography and culture.
The idea that a small group of them might have found something useful, which is at least backed up by some historical medical anecdote, is not on its surface implausible.
> The Strategic National Stockpile (SNS) has stockpiled enough smallpox vaccine to vaccinate every person in the United States. In a smallpox emergency, the SNS will coordinate with the Medical Countermeasures (MCM) coordinator or the preparedness office in the state or territorial health department. The MCM coordinator will allocate vaccine to local areas, depending upon the circumstances of the emergency.
How long that would take to roll out is anyone's guess, but I believe a vaccination campaign could rollout fairly quickly if the monkeypox outbreak turns out to be sufficiently contagious to warrant use of the reserve, assuming the reserve is effective against any possible mutations.
Considering the smallpox vaccine is well known to carry significant risks of severe adverse effects or death and among large groups government trust is very low, I don’t believe it’ll be that easy to roll out.
> Human-to-human transmission of monkeypox can occur through close contact with lesions on the skin, body fluids including respiratory droplets, and contaminated materials such as bedding. Transmission via respiratory droplets usually requires prolonged face-to-face contact.
it's worth noting that gay men practice many kinds of interaction that aren't anal sex, and the article does not at all suggest that anal sex was the route of transmission.
It's a technical point on the transmission vector of a new disease. HN encourages discussion that fuels curiosity. I'm very curious about this outbreak, especially while we're in an existing pandemic.
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It doesn't require anal sex, it requires prolonged skin-on-skin contact. The factor that makes gay men overrepresented among the current cases is likely to be the number of different sex partners, plus possibly a higher rate of detection because that community has been on high alert for a few days now.
The top comment was misleading. Of the number of people who practice anal sex, some of them are male. Of those, some are gay. Not all gay men practice anal sex.
Anal sex does not require a penis, and it does not imply bare sex organ contact. A better classifier would be "prostate stimulation" or "prostate orgasm", which all males can experiences and does not imply a particular sexuality.
My point is that there are far fewer power bottoms and gay men who want or enjoy another's penis in their anus than popular media suggests. Also, being gay doesn't imply indiscriminate sexual promiscuity. People who are that way will have sex with others regardless of their or their partners' sexes. Gay men are at higher risk of and when encountering these people because of smaller partner pools in any given area.
It may be showing up there because a portion of gay men are quite promiscuous. (Sorry, I'm not sure how to put it politely, even as a gay man.) There's not really a heterosexual equivalent to the gay sauna/bathhouse. It has shown up in populations of men who have attended such gay venues, as in the Portugal and Spanish outbreaks. [1] This does not automatically imply it requires anal sex, or even particularly favours anal sex as a vector. Anal sex would obviously count as close contact, of course. But the massages, and hand-genital, and oral-genital contact common in such venues (more so than anal sex, probably) would fit the transmission profile of monkeypox, too.
Reading these comments strongly reminds me of the early confusion and moral panic of about 1981-1982, when reports of something called GrID began. The conflation of infection vectors, susceptible populations, and behaviors helped cause years
of delay in public health response. Let’s not make exactly those same mistakes 40 years later.
It's worth noting that multiple outbreaks in several countries at the same time in gay communities without all of them attending the same parties should be such a rare occurrence other options should be considered.
Yes, it sounds like there are multiple disconnected infection clusters, with the assumption of a similar mode of transmission in each. (I’m obviously inferring this based on limited thin evidence.)
Consider a hypothetical autocratic regime with a history of criminalizing sexuality, committing human rights violations, and researching biological weapons. If their military felt it was time to deploy an airborne virus within enemy population centers, wouldn’t it make sense to do so simultaneously? And why wouldn’t this regime release it in a class of location that create plausible deniability, maligns a population historically persecuted by the regime, and foments societal conflict in the enemy?
Personally, given the implications, I’m hoping this warfare proves to be more informational than biological.
Not quite the discussion I was thinking I'd see here but I've been learning a lot more about the early HIV years. I'm straight leaning but have spent most of my life in gay circles. The health issues and the misinformation and fear of gay lifestyles outside but also inside of gay communities makes clarity so difficult and hard to depersonalize enough to manage safety protocols. Also, when the way someone loves has a high potential to kill them in exotic ways.... people get weird. Groups of people get nasty.
Thank you for your well written humorous point here.
I wonder if hiv is related. Has there been any information on whether the individuals have been infected at some point in their lives or are undergoing treatment for it?
Don't worry, somebody will find the evidence to support respiratory spread and then some governor will be "just listening to the data" by being safe and demanding more masks.
Edit: Unlike SARS-CoV-2, which spreads through tiny air-borne droplets called aerosols, monkeypox is thought to spread from close contact with bodily fluids, such as saliva from coughing. That means a person with monkeypox is likely to infect far fewer close contacts than someone with SARS-CoV-2
> RKI was criticised in German media it could lead to stigmatisation of homosexuals and africans.
Hmmm, wouldn't not making such important information public actually risk the lives of more people? I think more information is always good than less information. Plus straight people also engage in anal sex so it's not really exclusive.
They are glossing over it with nice language but “stigmatization” puts lives at risk. People don’t merely shun others, they get irritable and often attack those they consider “unclean”. This is something to consider seriously as the rise of right wing nationalist groups means the violence will be organized rather than random pogroms carried out by mobs.
Yeah better to put people's lives at risk by depriving them of information in order to potentially avoid stigmatizing someone else, right? Something something right wing violence.
From the article itself: "Another puzzle is why almost all of the case clusters include men aged 20–50, many of whom are gay, bisexual and have sex with men (GBMSM)"
Covid was also initially stated to not be a concern because human to human transmission wasn’t thought to be possible, then it didn’t have aerosol transmission, then it became inevitable that basically everyone would get infected.
I think it’ll take a couple weeks until we know whether this is an evolution that has airborne transmission or it’s just being spread through physical contact (and it fortunately seems to just be the latter). Until then it’s some researchers saying it won’t spread beyond a few cases and some people saying it’s the next plague.
This is a known disease that has some pretty distinct clusters. No doubt people would love to draw covid analogies, and will try and use the recent pandemic to try and amplify their own importance, but without some compelling evidence it is absurd to read further into this
Your assertion is as speculative as making up that any kind of disease has mutated and has a new transmission mechanism. As I said, there would need to be actual evidence before this gets any serious consideration. Just imagining the possibility because we've recently had another diseaed spread doesn't count for anything.
The GP had a throwaway comment but yours is just wrong. Do you think the companies making all the masks did so out of altruism? Government mandates of various kinds, plus covid fear in general, made all kinds of people rich. They also made many people poor. Regardless of whether you support different mandates, there were massive profits everywhere from them
You can Google the stories of US mask manufacturers. Most were only able to sell for a little while before Chinese suppliers came back and undercut them again.
that's delusional. there was rampant profiteering in the PPE industry, especially the companies that had government contract. the evidence of it is just 1 Google search away
Resellers, yes. But there are quite a few stories of how American mask manufacturers got the shaft after they spent money to ramp up production and then big buyers went immediately back to cheaper, foreign alternatives the moment they were available again. Now those manufacturers are stuck with huge supply gluts and have had to lay off workers.
There is more money in going the conspiratorial way, precisely because that appeals directly to the hindbrain. Fear, paranoia, distrust, persecution complex, the whole kit.
What do you mean by $currentThing? Certainly this is, indeed, a current thing. But so are most things in the news - it's named for it! (O, the ceaseless march of time.) I don't understand why it's necessary to call attention to the fact that the news is new.
Ah. I don't really see how making fun of people who performatively support popular causes is relevant here, but I suppose memes move in mysterious ways. Perhaps it's assumed that because this may become relevant, actions against monkeypox will surely get performatively supported? But then, I'd say that pre-emptively aggressively opposing that is only going to make it more likely, not less, that this becomes some kind of a "culture war" issue that gets performative support. (As any teenager knows, an ostentatious roll of the eye at the other side only intensifies the argument.)
In Canada for example, they stopped giving routine smallpox vaccinations around 1972. So you'd have to be "old" to have had it, for some definition of "old". :)
Probably yes. In the literature Small pox vaccination protects against monkey pox. And such DNA viruses are very stable.
The interesting part is that you can get pretty much any vaccine except the small pox vaccine now. Figure that out. They’ll give a six month baby a hepatitis b vaccine in case it has… sex or shoots iv drugs? But vaccinating for the most deadly disease ever? Can’t do it. The rational is that there’s no need given small pox has been eradicated. Yet many of the pandemic scenarios specifically cite small/monkey pox as the disease vector precisely because it’s bad and no one is immune any more.
The responsible thing would be to allow the vaccine to be taken voluntarily by adults. A certain section of the population would become immune and bring us much closer to herd immunity and either protect against an out break or very much slow it down.
Babies can get HepB from being born, it's pretty messy, fluids of all types get everywhere, including in the baby's eyes. That's why the WHO recommends a "birth dose" if it's possible the mother is infected. You get another two doses separated by six months after that for more durable and improved protection, so you don't have to start the whole three dose 1.5 year long series again when you want to have sex or become a medical worker or whatever. Otherwise, I totally agree with your points on smallpox, you really should be able to get vaccinated if you want to.
It can be transmitted between family members too. I would hazard a guess that, given the risk factors for hepatitis B include being an IV drug user who shares needles, there’s probably a correlation between the mother and/or the father having hepatitis B and not bringing their kid back to get vaccinated later.
Smallpox vaccine is contagious (live virus varicella I think) and can have awful side effects (full body blisters, death) for people with eczema which is far more common. Even without exzema, side effects are hard.
Based on what I was hearing on some morning podcasts the other day (sorry, no citation handy, but it was something mainstream...NPR perhaps), the smallpox vaccine was something like 75% effective against monkeypox. Which makes it MORE effective than the MMR is against things like mumps (which my wife found out the hard way a couple years back has only a roughly 70% efficacy).
39 day old low karma account. Normally, I think "what the hell let's have this conversation" but RU/UA are in a hot war, and comments of this nature to speculation of war's widening effects need to be read in the context of active disinformation and destabilising behaviour online.
Why would a low karma account be used to make this speculative statement?
Yes, absolutely acknowledge it's a bit ad-hommy. But, the question stands: "the Russians diddit" had to be seen in the context we're in. Remember, a shitload of buuut Chyna is washup of US domestic politics and not actually about Covid.
Anyone can take a look and make the call is "do the research restated" btw. That's a Q call. Maybe that's ad hommy too? All getting very meta.
OP shouldn't have to tie together identities because you're too short sighted to
"do you own research" and evaluate a comment without reverting to lame fucking dog whistles.
"someone with a checkmark tell me how to feel about this talking point" - you
They presented a false dichotomy though. With no evidence yet that this one has ability for enhanced spread, both alternatives they gave imply that it does.
Thank you for pointing that out, as a guy who excelled at physics and failed biology I just assumed it had an enhanced spread. I'll edit the post to reflect that.
Some people are genuinely fairly new to HN. I only became aware of this place a few months ago in following the ACOUP blog.
But that's indistinguishable from astroturf accounts to an outsider so tell you what, I have a reddit account I've used for over a year and post regularly on. I've posted a link to your comment as a self-post on that account:
I've got an older account if you still want to establish my sincerity although I lost the password and never was able to recover it. That doesn't count for much but if you chuck the corpus of it and /adotsapiens in an authorship verification program it'll spit out a match.
You'll find it's all consistent with a white British politically opinionated nerd between the ages of 20 and 25, employed in a succession of blue-collar jobs, because that's the real deal.
It feels a bit like a re-run of AIDS in the Mid 80's, but luckily this time we do have a vaccine for it. It will be interesting to see how the growth of this virus compares with Covid and if epidemiologists can learn anything from it.
strange that this panic coincides with the WHO treaty conference and vote, which starts tomorrow and would give WHO global surveillance capabilities and be mandatory for countries to implement
113 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 219 ms ] thread- "As a precaution against bioterrorism, countries such as the United States maintain a supply of smallpox vaccines, as well as an antiviral treatment thought to be highly effective against the virus. The therapies probably wouldn’t be deployed on a large scale, though, McCollum says. Health-care workers would probably instead use a method called ‘ring vaccination’ to contain the spread of monkeypox: this would vaccinate the close contacts of people who have been infected with monkeypox to cut off any routes of transmission."
https://xkcd.com/1217/
"When you see a claim that a common drug or vitamin 'kills cancer cells in a petri dish', keep in mind: so does a handgun."
Given that smallpox helped nearly wipe out the Native Americans, I'm doubly skeptical of "ancient Native American remedy for smallpox!" claims.
The idea that a small group of them might have found something useful, which is at least backed up by some historical medical anecdote, is not on its surface implausible.
> The Strategic National Stockpile (SNS) has stockpiled enough smallpox vaccine to vaccinate every person in the United States. In a smallpox emergency, the SNS will coordinate with the Medical Countermeasures (MCM) coordinator or the preparedness office in the state or territorial health department. The MCM coordinator will allocate vaccine to local areas, depending upon the circumstances of the emergency.
How long that would take to roll out is anyone's guess, but I believe a vaccination campaign could rollout fairly quickly if the monkeypox outbreak turns out to be sufficiently contagious to warrant use of the reserve, assuming the reserve is effective against any possible mutations.
> Human-to-human transmission of monkeypox can occur through close contact with lesions on the skin, body fluids including respiratory droplets, and contaminated materials such as bedding. Transmission via respiratory droplets usually requires prolonged face-to-face contact.
> Another puzzle is why almost all of the case clusters include men aged 20–50, many of whom are gay, bisexual and have sex with men (GBMSM).
That means it's probably less contagious if it requires anal sex to transmit.
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Anal sex does not require a penis, and it does not imply bare sex organ contact. A better classifier would be "prostate stimulation" or "prostate orgasm", which all males can experiences and does not imply a particular sexuality.
My point is that there are far fewer power bottoms and gay men who want or enjoy another's penis in their anus than popular media suggests. Also, being gay doesn't imply indiscriminate sexual promiscuity. People who are that way will have sex with others regardless of their or their partners' sexes. Gay men are at higher risk of and when encountering these people because of smaller partner pools in any given area.
[1] https://nationalpost.com/pmn/health-pmn/spain-monkeypox-case...
Consider a hypothetical autocratic regime with a history of criminalizing sexuality, committing human rights violations, and researching biological weapons. If their military felt it was time to deploy an airborne virus within enemy population centers, wouldn’t it make sense to do so simultaneously? And why wouldn’t this regime release it in a class of location that create plausible deniability, maligns a population historically persecuted by the regime, and foments societal conflict in the enemy?
Personally, given the implications, I’m hoping this warfare proves to be more informational than biological.
Oh man that's loaded. Why does everybody always pigeonhole male on male sex together with anal?
Not everybody is doing it, and really, why would you associate (see what I did here?) monkeypox with ass?
Mucous membranes are mucous membranes, and besides that you can't deduce anything without further information on how it transmits.
And after all, anal is a bit like Java, works with all genders.
Pretty lame-ass logic here.
Thank you for your well written humorous point here.
Edit: Unlike SARS-CoV-2, which spreads through tiny air-borne droplets called aerosols, monkeypox is thought to spread from close contact with bodily fluids, such as saliva from coughing. That means a person with monkeypox is likely to infect far fewer close contacts than someone with SARS-CoV-2
RKI was criticised in German media it could lead to stigmatisation of homosexuals and africans.
Hmmm, wouldn't not making such important information public actually risk the lives of more people? I think more information is always good than less information. Plus straight people also engage in anal sex so it's not really exclusive.
My eyes are rolling out of my head.
"Saving human lives" is often quite far down the list of priorities for governments and international organizations, despite their claims.
But they’re very highly correlated.
I think it’ll take a couple weeks until we know whether this is an evolution that has airborne transmission or it’s just being spread through physical contact (and it fortunately seems to just be the latter). Until then it’s some researchers saying it won’t spread beyond a few cases and some people saying it’s the next plague.
In contrast there are about 2k Monkeypox cases per year, still lots of unknowns but pandemic potential is near nil IMO.
Are you trying to say that cnn spread covid?
https://www.nti.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/NTI_Paper_BIO...
It's a reference to https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-support-the-current-thing
The interesting part is that you can get pretty much any vaccine except the small pox vaccine now. Figure that out. They’ll give a six month baby a hepatitis b vaccine in case it has… sex or shoots iv drugs? But vaccinating for the most deadly disease ever? Can’t do it. The rational is that there’s no need given small pox has been eradicated. Yet many of the pandemic scenarios specifically cite small/monkey pox as the disease vector precisely because it’s bad and no one is immune any more.
The responsible thing would be to allow the vaccine to be taken voluntarily by adults. A certain section of the population would become immune and bring us much closer to herd immunity and either protect against an out break or very much slow it down.
Looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox_vaccine#MVA-BN there is a new non-replicating vaccine from 2013.
Why would a low karma account be used to make this speculative statement?
Anyone can take a look and make the call is "do the research restated" btw. That's a Q call. Maybe that's ad hommy too? All getting very meta.
judge comments on their own standing merits.
OP shouldn't have to tie together identities because you're too short sighted to "do you own research" and evaluate a comment without reverting to lame fucking dog whistles.
"someone with a checkmark tell me how to feel about this talking point" - you
But that's indistinguishable from astroturf accounts to an outsider so tell you what, I have a reddit account I've used for over a year and post regularly on. I've posted a link to your comment as a self-post on that account:
https://www.reddit.com/user/ADotSapiens/comments/uue2sb/yo_v...
Feel free to let that additional internet footprint act as some kind of bona fides.
Well done.
https://reddit.com/user/malariadandelion
You'll find it's all consistent with a white British politically opinionated nerd between the ages of 20 and 25, employed in a succession of blue-collar jobs, because that's the real deal.
tell him to go fuck himself, you make everyone else look "like a russian troll" by kneeling to these ungenuine, discussion-destroying idiots.
why didn't they take advantage of COVID in this way? Phone based contact tracing was optional in most of the world.
https://www.wallstreet-online.de/nachricht/15489723-bavarian...