Leukemia (Blood Cancer)

Monkeypox is a viral infection and the reservoir is in small mammals usually rodents in west African and central African forests and so people get infected if they come into contact in some way with those animals it can then spread from person to person but it's not very efficient at transmitting and so what we normally see is maybe one or two people get infected from that case and then it dies out because it's not very infectious within uh human population it usually starts with fever and headache people feel pretty miserable and tired they can get swollen glands and then this typical rash develops which is sort of pustular in form and that's usually what's infectious and this is infectious until the scabs actually fall off of this it's normally spread by close contact either touching the skin or alternatively from touching bedding or shared utensils of some sort so that's the usual way in which it's spread and if you're very close then from coughing can also spread it.  

Most people will recover and recover fully within a few weeks but people can have a serious disease and may need to be hospitalized with it the strain that's being seen in the current outbreak in Europe is the West African strain which has a mortality rate of about 1 in 100 so it's milder than the central African strain but still, it's serious disease monkeypox rarely is seen outside of Africa. When it is it's brought to another country by uh somebody going through international travel until this year there'd been very few cases ever reported around the world of this but then this year we've had this unprecedented cluster of cases that's occurred it seems to be quite distributed geographically and what we're not sure about is how connected the different clusters of cases in the UK, Portugal, and Spain.

Even one case in Pakistan is and this has never been seen before so this is quite alarming from a public health point of view and something that we really need to get a grip of and control as quickly as we can, there's no need to panic here this is not going to spread and get into the general population and cause an epidemic like coronavirus has but even so this is a pretty large cluster over what appears to be quite a large area this is an unusual outbreak in that it's occurring in men who have sex with men it's not been reported to be a sexually transmitted infection before but clearly we need to investigate that further to see if it can spread in that room but just through close direct contact we do know that it can spread so that probably is at the moment the best working hypothesis for how it is spreading from person to person.

Monkeypox is closely related to smallpox which was eradicated uh several decades ago and it's clear that the smallpox vaccine does give some cross-protection against monkeypox one of the reasons that we think that there has been this increase in cases of monkeypox in Africa is that routine smallpox vaccination was Stopped once the disease was eradicated by giving smallpox vaccination to people who were at high risk of being exposed to monkeypox or indeed shortly after they've got, it will prevent them from getting the infection so that is one of the interventions that will be offered to contacts of people who have had monkey pumps.