A leading infectious diseases expert in Boston who’s on a surveillance team that helped identify the first monkeypox cases in Europe says he doesn’t expect the virus to become a “big epidemic,” but cautioned that many questions remain about the outbreak.
Davidson Hamer, a Boston University School of Public Health infectious diseases specialist, also told the Herald that this novel outbreak coming after two-plus years of the COVID-19 pandemic “shows how vulnerable we are to the introduction of new pathogens.”
Scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are tracking many cases of monkeypox that have been reported in several countries that don’t normally report monkeypox, including the U.S., which has 24 confirmed cases. The Massachusetts Department of Public Health reported the first case in the country.
“There are lots of questions we still need to answer,” Hamer said. “But it’s good to reassure people that yes, over 1,000 confirmed cases worldwide, but I think it’s going to remain relatively localized in high-risk communities, and that control measures will gradually cause it to subside.
“But the outbreak shows how vulnerable we are to the introduction of new pathogens,” he added.
Many of the monkeypox patients are presenting with lower-body groin lesions, as people spread it through skin-to-skin close contact. Those lesions can be confused with sexually transmitted infections, Hamer noted.
“My worry is it’s not going to be as easy to control as we think,” he said. “I don’t think it’s going to be a big epidemic. It’s just going to be a big worry.”
Hamer is the surveillance lead for GeoSentinel, a surveillance and research network that has 70 sites in 28 countries. GeoSentinel, which is funded by the CDC, focuses on international travelers, migrants and refugees with imported infectious diseases.
Through their network, they learned of the monkeypox outbreak in the first half of May when some of the first few cases were identified in the U.K. Since then, at least eight of their sites have seen patients with monkeypox, including tropical medicine centers in Spain, Portugal, Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden and Canada.
“We have so many cases now, and we are taking advantage of the networks to try and collect more information to understand how this disease is being transmitted and where it might have come from,” Hamer said. “Most importantly, we’re trying to define how wide it spread, and work with countries to help control it.”
Other remaining questions are whether monkeypox can spread when someone doesn’t have any symptoms and also if the virus can be shed in reproductive tract secretions.
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