By Carol A. Cates, MSN, MBA, RN
Chief Nursing Officer
Odessa Regional Medical Center
This is kind of terrible, but I am excited to finally be able to talk about something in the news that is healthcare related and not COVID. Not that I am in any way excited to hear and talk about another viral disease of concern in the world, but at least its something different! The reason monkeypox is currently of concern is because its normally a disease that is only seen in central and western Africa, but has been seen in the last few weeks in several countries, including the U.S., that don’t normally see any cases of monkeypox.
Monkeypox is rare. The virus that causes monkeypox is in the same family as smallpox, the vaccina virus (which is used in smallpox vaccine) and cowpox. It was first discovered in 1958 in a group of research monkeys, which is where the name came from. The first recorded human case was in 1970 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Despite the fact we are seeing cases in the U.S. right now, the overall risk here is very low.
African rodents are suspected to play a part in the transmission of monkeypox between animals and humans. Monkeypox spreads between people primarily though direct contacted with infected sores, scabs, or body fluids. It can spread by respiratory droplets with prolonged face-to-face contact. It can spread during activities such as sex, kissing, cuddling, or touching parts of the body with infected sores. It also can spread by surface contacts such as touching clothing, bandages, and linens that have touched infected sores. I know that sounds like a lot of ways to transmit, but if you think about it, all those ways are up close and personal. It’s not like COVID where you need to stay 6 feet away, and should wear a mask because it doesn’t take much for the respiratory droplets to cause infection. With monkeypox for the most part, you need to be touching people or their fluids.
Because of that, the best way to prevent monkeypox is to avoid contact with infected people or animals and avoid touching the things that come in contact with infected sores. The other thing to prevent monkeypox is something that prevents everything that is transmitted through contact, good hand hygiene — either by washing your hands with soap and water, making sure to scrub all the surfaces of the hands for at least 20 seconds, or by using hand sanitizer, covering all the hand surfaces and rubbing until hands are dry.
Monkeypox symptoms usually start to show about 7-14 days after infection but can be as early as 5 days or as late as 21 days after exposure. Early symptoms are fever, headache, muscle aches, backache, swollen lymph nodes, chills, and exhaustion. Those are followed by a rash that begins on the face and then spreads over the body. The rash eventually develops pustules that scab over and then fall off. The entire process can last 4 weeks. The scary part of monkeypox is that the mortality rate is about 10%. The other scary thing is monkeypox, like all viruses, can change, and the more people it infects, the faster it can change. We saw that with COVID, the more people who were infected, the more opportunities it had to change, which lead to the multiple waves and re-infections we saw and continue to see. That is why prevention is so very important. It stops that ability of the virus to reproduce and change.
Because monkeypox is a virus, there really isn’t a cure. Some antivirals have been shown to help, but treatment mostly is supportive care so the body can heal itself. Because of that, people with weak immune systems (the elderly, small children, those with chronic illnesses or immune disorders) are at higher risk to both get and have severe consequences of monkeypox.
Again, the risk of monkeypox is low, but because it’s a virus and can change, people need to be aware and take measures to prevent transmission. The best way to do that is wash your hands, stay away from people who are ill, if you are ill stay away from others and seek medical attention as soon as possible if you start showing the early symptoms of monkeypox, especially if you know you have been exposed to someone who has monkey pox.
