Monkeypox has an incubation period of about one to two weeks and illness normally lasts for between two and four weeks with most people recovering on their own. “Whether or not that is genital-to-genital contact or through other contact is not clear to me, though if pocks occur in the genital area than such sexual transmission is likely.
“It would not be surprising that sex – which does tend to require close person to person skin contact over a quite wide area of the body – would also enable transmission of monkeypox,” said Prof Hunter. However, some academics say it is possible the virus does spread in this “novel” way, even if it is not its primary route of infection. It has emerged recently that it is possible the virus is also passed during sexual activity, something never described before.Įxperts are divided on this topic, with scientists loath to say it is a new STI. Prof Paul Hunter, professor in medicine at the University of East Anglia, estimates there is only a 10 per cent risk of a person infecting someone they live with. Between these new cases, there will have been that close contact.”
“It needs very close contact, for example skin-to-skin contact with an individual who is infectious with a monkeypox rash. “It’s a hard virus to transmit between humans,” said Dr Head. It can also be caught from eating or touching infected animals. Routes of transmission from one person to another are via large exhaled droplets and skin-to-skin contact with open sores. Unlike Covid, monkeypox can not spread easily through a population as it requires very close contact. The World Health Organisation (WHO) added that there is “minimal” risk of onward spread from an infected person in the UK due to contact tracing and isolation protocols. He added that the smallpox vaccine can also protect against monkeypox, but this inoculation was halted in 1971 due to a low level of disease.ĭr Michael Head, a leading global health expert from the University of Southampton, said that with the sophisticated healthcare in the UK, “the risks to the wider public are extremely low”.
“It’s a poxvirus, in the same family as variola virus, which caused smallpox before it was eradicated globally in 1980,” said Dr Michael Skinner, a reader in virology at Imperial College London. It was first discovered in the 1950s and jumped into humans in the 1970s. The condition’s visible lesions and bumps on an afflicted group of research primates in 1958 led to the red herring of a moniker. The name monkeypox is somewhat misleading as it is a virus that circulates most often in small mammals in Africa, such as rats, which are believed to be the disease’s reservoir.