In late spring, when data were starting to show the monkeypox virus was “efficiently” passing from person to person in the US, Dr Anthony Fauci, President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser, experienced a sinking feeling he’d felt before: back in the early days of the HIV pandemic.
Officially, more than 6 600 people across the US have been diagnosed with monkeypox since 18 May, when the first domestic patient in this outbreak was discovered in Massachusetts. Health experts say the true number of cases is probably much higher.
Positive tests have been trickling in steadily, first a drip, then a pour, and now, up to a flood of hundreds of new monkeypox diagnoses are logged daily.
At least three states (California, Illinois and New York) have declared states of emergency for the disease, the White House has named a monkeypox response team, and the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is scrambling to bolster its “limited supply” of the one vaccine licensed for use against monkeypox in the US, reports Business Insider SA.
But it was before all this that Fauci got that familiar sinking feeling. “It was very reminiscent of what we saw in the early days of HIV,” he said.
Unlike past monkeypox diagnoses logged in the US, by and large, the monkeypox lesions seen in this outbreak have been spreading in intimate areas of the body, among men who have sex with men.
“It was sort of a gradual ‘oh my goodness’,” said Fauci, who directs the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “From the beginning, the epidemiological circumstances under which it occurred were troublesome to me, having been there 41 years ago with HIV.”
Doctors and scientists in the US started researching the human immunodeficiency virus in 1981, “when HIV was not yet discovered. We didn’t even call it Aids,” Fauci told an oral history project in 2007. Initially, the disease was reported in just a handful of gay men living in Los Angeles. Two of them died.
At the time, Fauci thought maybe “it was just a fluke”, he told journalists at a vaccine conference in 2019.
In the early 1980s, there was a lot of “confusion” about how the virus was transmitted, and if it were only spreading among gay men.
It was not. HIV, like other viral diseases (including monkeypox) can affect anyone who’s vulnerable and exposed, under the right circumstances.
“As it evolved, literally week after week after week, you’d get the unfolding and the evolution of the epidemiology, which made it clear it wasn’t restricted just to gay men,” Fauci said.
Unlike the HIV crisis, he hopes the current monkeypox outbreak won’t end up with millions of people infected around the globe needing treatment.
“Anything is possible, but it is unlikely,” he told Science Vs. “If we continue to put our foot on the pedal, get as many people vaccinated as possible, get control of it, I believe we can do that.”
See more from MedicalBrief archives:
WHO declares monkeypox a global health emergency
Scientists warn of more zoonotic diseases as third SA monkeypox case confirmed
Monkeypox: forecasters predict the global outlook for 2022