Kyoda. I'm Chelsea Daniels and This is the Front Page, a daily podcast presented by The New Zealand Herald. There was an outbreak of the virus formerly known as monkey pox back in twenty twenty two, but a new variant that originated in the Democratic Republic of Congo has proved fatal, with dozens of deaths from thousands of cases. The new variant has also been found beyond the borders of Africa, sparking warnings by the World Health Organization and calls for
international support to stem this outbreak. Today on the Front Page, University of Auckland Associate professor and co director of the Global Vaccine Data Network, doctor Helen Patussus Harris, joins us to explain what you need to.
Know about this new out break.
Helen, what is ampox, what sort of virus is it and what symptoms does it create?
And generally how does it spread.
It's a member of a family called orthpox viruses, and it's not a new virus at all. It's quite closely related to the smallpox virus, which caused havoc for thousands of years in our history. It doesn't spread that easily. It's not airborne or anything. But it is spread through close contact, particularly people who have the lesions. Before those have held over, they're infectious and they can be also infectious for a little while before they start showing symptoms as well.
What kind of symptoms does it create?
We, like so many diseases we talk about, it tends to start with flu like illness with fever and cherll, swollen lymph nodes, feeling really tired, headache, and also potentially some congesture. So very much those symptoms you get when your immune system starting to respond to something, and then there's this rash that's pretty horrible to look at and can be extremely painful.
Am I right to say that this used to be called monkey pocks? What led to the name change?
Well, yeh, I think we appreciate now it's pretty uncool to name diseases after people, places, or animals, because that can come with a degree of stigma, which is usually pretty unwarranted.
You know.
An example is, you know, with the outbreak of this that happened in twenty twenty two in Brazil, people started to kill monkeys because they were concerned that they were going to get this pox from monkeys. So there's been a move over some years now to move away from those sort of names, so hence now it's called MPOs.
What does this mean for the average person, the.
Average person, say in New Zealand.
I mean the first identification of the virus was actually teen fifty three in a lab in Denmark that was among monkeys, hence the name. But actually the first case in humans was noted in nineteen seventy in an infant, and from their cases sort of just growing slowly in some of the central African countries, including Nigeria. So there's a couple of clades, and there's a clade that is primarily found in the Congo, which is called Clade one, and the one in Nigeria is called clade two, so
they're slightly different sort of clades. But those cases there in Africa have slowly been growing over the decades until suddenly some cases started to pop up outside of Africa.
Yeah, I remember a few years ago there was an outbreak of EMPOS that spread largely through the gay community.
How did that start and is it linked to this current outbreak.
It's not linked to the current outbreak. That one started either.
Understand somebody from the UK had visited Nigeria and went back, and I did understand that there were some festivals or something on, so you had this sort of super spreader event and the cases sort of spilled out from there, which is where we saw that twenty two to twenty three outbreak. That was a different clade than the one that we've got at the moment. So in twenty twenty two it was.
The clade two. This time it's the clade one, which has.
Been more dominant in the Democratic Republic of Congo. This one, it's developed mutations that have enabled it to better spread person to person, so you're seeing it affecting both children and adults.
The World Health Organization has declared empox outbreaks in Congo and other African countries a global health emergency. It's from same family as smallpox, but the symptoms are a little bit less, such as body eggs and fevers as well as well. Than five hundred people have died from the virus and thousands of people have been infected. This is more than one hundred and sixty percent increase of cases from the same time last year and nearly a twenty percent increase in the number of debts.
What more can you tell us about this current outbreak, in particular the fact the virus is now contributing to a higher mortality rate.
Am I right, Well, here may be it's been quite difficult to ascertain the mortality rate because you sort of have to know how many cases you've got, and for a long time, probably had a lot of cases that were going undetected, particularly due to for example, in Nigeria, they criminalize same sex activity also expression of trans people.
The maximum penalty is actually a death sentence. So if you presented with this pox and you may be seen to be affiliated with these practices, it could be very debtrial mental to you, so you can sort of appreciate why people might keep quite quiet about it.
So it's really hard to know.
And we've seen a lower mortality rate outside of Africa, so you've also got different populations, You've probably got different healthcare.
So I think that's a good question.
But yes, this one does seem to be more lethal than the other one.
Is connecting mpox with the LGBTQ plus community, Is that a bit of a misnomer.
Yeah, because it's spread through close contacts, so you just have to have close contact that can spread in family households, you can come into contact with the say the bed linen, for example. You don't need to have sex to transmit or to become infected with us. So there's a lot of ways and a lot of knowledge that we still need to unpack to better understand it.
The World Health Organization has declared this an international public health emergency. How does that translate to authorities here?
It's a move that sort of elevates people's awareness and also requires a coordinated international response, puts more of a priority on it. For example, the focus on therapeutics and vaccines for example, and also for people to collaborate, countries, nations to collaborate in sharing their knowledge. So if you want to dampen down an outbreak or control it or
eliminate it, you need to collaborate. Because people just hop on planes all the time, and of course the infection, that's how it pops up all over the place and how it's spread. In twenty twenty two, it's a plane rid of way.
Some health experts say that this is concerning not just for Africa but for the world. But the world's likely only going to care now that it's a.
Risk to them.
I suppose do we need to reevaluate this support given to places like Africa, particularly around their health system.
Absolutely absolutely. I know we're an island, but we're not really.
It is a global community, and when it comes to infectious diseases that I appreciate borders and it is horrible. You know when you see oh, now, it's interesting because you know it might affect us well. People have been warning about these pos viruses as potential emergent diseases for quite some time. They were warning about coronaviruses long before
our current pandemic. These are just an example of pathogens that can sort of emerge beyond where they're currently endemic to affect the global community.
So obviously the easiest thing.
To do would be to deal with the outbreaks at the source before they become a problem. But of course that hasn't occurred because again, we don't pay so much attention.
I remember reading a few years ago about how Africa had just gotten a handle on a bowler, and when that news came out, I remember having conversations with people who were shocked that it.
Was actually still a thing.
But it was still a problem in Africa, right, And they seem to be battling that for decades after the rest of the world, and that's one of those examples of the rest of us turning away from it.
I guess, yeah, it's I guess it's human nature, isn't it, Because there's so much that goes on in the world that it's impossible to pay attention to all of it
until it comes knocking on your own door. But yeah, the Ebola epidemics, I guess the good news is that effective vaccines were able to help control those and also the improvement in awareness and education for people, because again a bola is not the most infectious disease known to man, and through good education and fiction control measures and also now some effective vaccines, it dampens down that threat. But it shouldn't come to that. That was always on the list.
That's another example of a virus that's been on the list for a long time of potential emerging diseases.
Are we seeing pharmaceutical companies prioritize a vaccine against mpox? I remember when there was that outbreak and I think you said twenty twenty two in the gay community.
The vaccines were quite limited, weren't they.
Well, yes, and no, Actually, lucky for US something prepared earlier thanks to smallpox, which was eradicated in nineteen eighty. But the small pox vaccine is also protective against empox potentially other pox viruses as well. So what had been stockpiled for years were doses of the what we'd call
the second generation small pox vaccine. That's not an ideal vaccine, and actually because people hadn't been using it under these sorts of conditions, I guess I didn't really know if it was actually going to be effective under the circumstances.
But fortunately, because it's always on the radar small pox, and then when we.
Saw impos appearing more and more in Africa, vaccines were considered also as having utility against impos. So the third generation vaccine is made by a company in Denmark, and there was stocks in twenty twenty two. They had actually diverted their manufacturing at the time because you don't actually have a very good market other than perhaps a defense force or something for these sort of vaccines, so it's not exactly a good money spinner. But they've now diverted back to focus on this vaccine.
It'll be about one hundred dollars per dose for these vaccines.
Will African countries be able to get enough of.
Them to be able to contain this outbring I don't think so. I'm grateful for the Japan government who give a donation of three million point five hundred doses of these vaccines to DFC, but as we knew, we have the limitation of funding, and it's very important that people do the best to look for money to fund these vaccinations.
Some good news is that they very recently announced a collaboration with the African CDC to not just provide fifteen million doses to these African countries who.
Have these risks, but also to collaborate.
With them so that the manufacturing capabilities in Africa are enhancement they can make the vaccine themselves, which I think is really really important.
Do you think the world has learned anything from COVID and use that information to kind of stop empocks spreading further.
To say, yes, it's still pretty fresh, but it's actually quite amazing at how quickly people forget and these threats aren't going to go away. This wasn't you know, COVID wasn't the one for the century. There's a whole lot of other potential threats there, so we sort of can't take the eye off the ball, like, for example, the African continent having their own capacity is one really important step, actually, and that's something that needs a lot more attention diverted to it, I.
Think, and even the general population as well. I suppose we all felt that fatigue after the COVID pandemic, and then you saw very quickly people coming to work without the face mask on when you've got a little bit of a cough, and you can kind of see everything going back to normal, so to speak. But we really should be adopting some of those measures that we did do in COVID in our everyday lives from now on, shouldn't we.
It's always been good practice, and I sort of I think most people's nanners would have told them that because they knew that washing your hands and all of that was good. And I think we had better behavior back then, I think than we do now. I think peraps, a lot's taken for granted, where we just have this absence in our face of disease and very short mentor so.
I hope the global scientific community have learned a lot from COVID, and there's also a lot of infrastructure that got put in and that we would hopefully be able to leverage off. But of course having the political will is probably a different story. You know, if you want to need resources, you need to have political commitment and leadership.
Thanks for joining us, Helen.
That said, for this episode of the Front Page, you can read more about today's stories and extensive news coverage at NZED herold dot co dot z. The Front Page is produced by Ethan Sells with sound engineer Patty Fox.
I'm Chelsea Daniels.
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