Well, as of late August 2022, Monkeypox is getting more attention than I would have thought possible. This is a disease that I learned about in my military tropical medicine and biowarfare training, but I guarantee very few physicians and almost no one in the general public knew about before May of 2022.
A Google search of the term gives 726 million results. The media tells us about a man diagnosed with Monkeypox and COVID at the same time. The first Monkeypox death in the US is reported (though with a little digging you discover the person had multiple medical problems). A family dog has the Pox. All of this attention leads to a new panic, which is reinforced by government agencies and health authorities declaring emergency! with their response plans at the ready. I write to disabuse you of the fear those “experts” are fomenting.
The reality of our current situation is that Monkeypox is absolutely NOT a public health emergency– as seen in this graph:
It has the potential to be a serious disease (but usually not). We know how to control it, can treat it, and the daily new cases are decreasing, rapidly. The problem is that everyone is now a junior epidemiologist and government authorities want to jump in to take controlling and heroic measures. None of this is necessary. People are changing their behaviors. The fancy stuff - vaccines and drugs - cannot and will not modify the incidence curve the way that common sense action already has.
John Snow stopped a Cholera epidemic in 19th century London with one simple action: he took the pump handle off of a contaminated well. We live in a more complicated world than Snow’s, and there is more than a single contaminated pump but it’s still worth taking off the handles we find.
So why is an obscure regional disease now spreading across the globe? The virus isn’t an inherent threat to public health. It’s been studied since the 1970s and is known to be an insignificant pathogen as seen in the excerpts from journal articles below:
The low incidence rate of human monkeypox indicates its limited public health importance even in a well-known enzootic area.
Presumed human transmission has occurred in 38 out of 61 outbreaks of human monkeypox and only once reached the third and once the fourth generation; the transmission in all affected villages under observation has extinguished itself. Considering the sporadic and relatively rare occurrence of the disease and expected complications following the immunization with vaccinia which protects from monkeypox, introduction of mass vaccination in the areas at risk is hardly justified at present.
The inefficient spread from person to person, even in conditions of maximum exposure, supports the concept that monkeypox virus is poorly adapted for sustained transmission between humans and that such transmission does not pose a significant health problem.
several factors inherent to the genetic makeup and ecology of monkeypox virus would seem to diminish the probability that this disease will spread to a significant degree outside the moist tropical forests of West and Central Africa.
Since inter-human transmission has never or only very exceptionally been documented, monkeypox does not represent a serious threat to humans.
The virus hasn’t changed – we have. Pick any measure of health and look at the trends. We get sick with infectious diseases because we are already sick with lifestyle diseases.
Pox is not the real threat. We live in a digitally connected world that tricks us. We humans require and thrive on real, direct interaction. The authoritarian mandates of the last three years have effectively broken many of our physical connections. They have herded us into the social media portals, the Zoom rooms, the no touch delivery of goods and services. When we exist in those channels, managed by a third party, you and I are no longer truly in control of our interactions. When those interactions and communications are manipulated and throttled, we lose fidelity and the truth of the stories we relate to one another. The truth of Monkeypox is simple – avoid close and sustained contact with people who are sick and have rashes. You would be able to learn that if you had unfiltered conversations with people in your community, rather than consuming the sewage of the propaganda piped in through your digital device. If you happen to get sick, seek care from a health practitioner who will work for you rather than the corporate medical system. Be honest with yourself about your lifestyle and work on improving it.
Take a higher level view and realize that this Pox is just the latest iteration of the ongoing stream of fear inducing emergencies that are manipulated to keep populations in check. Be a skeptical consumer of information and stay directly connected to your community. With that we will help one another weather the storms, real or manufactured, that beset us.
Thank you Dr. Ross for speaking out.