Pox-Like Outbreak Reported
19 Ill in Midwest; CDC Issues Alert
washingtonpost.com
At least 19 people in three Midwestern states have contracted a disease related to smallpox, marking the first outbreak of the life-threatening illness in the United States, federal heath officials said yesterday.....
....."This is an unusual event. As far as we can tell, there's never been a human or animal illness in the community setting in the Western hemisphere by a virus that is either a monkeypox virus or a very close variant of the monkeypox virus," said Hughes, who held a hastily arranged telebriefing last evening to announce the outbreak after CDC scientists confirmed that a monkeypox virus or one very close to it was involved.
"We've got a disease that's not been seen before in the Western Hemisphere, so it's prudent to take it very seriously," Hughes said in a telephone interview after the briefing.....
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Monkeypox in Humans
content.nejm.org
.....Only 13 cases of monkeypox were reported from 1987 through 1992, and none from 1993 through 1995.16 Beginning in February 1996, monkeypox outbreaks in the Democratic Republic of the Congo were reported, but investigations were limited because of civil disorder.3,4 A joint team from the WHO and the Democratic Republic of the Congo visited the province of Kasai Oriental and concluded that 511 cases of suspected monkeypox had occurred between February 1996 and October 1997.5,16 Laboratory studies have since revealed that a substantial proportion of the suspected cases were actually cases of varicella; hence, the observed high incidence of possible household transmission (42 percent) was not surprising. Moreover, the disease was relatively mild, and overall case fatality rates were about 1 percent. On the basis of the available data, one cannot conclude that monkeypox has changed genetically or in its pathogenesis, severity, or propensity for human-to-human spread. Careful field studies, to provide more definitive answers, are planned by the WHO..... |
