“The world and all its people have won freedom from smallpox,which was the most devastating disease sweeping in epidemic form through many countries since earliest times,leaving death,blindness and disfigurement in its wake,” the organisation said.
There are few supplies of monkeypox vaccine in Australia.AP
Smallpox killed millions through the ages,sent survivors blind and helped bring about the fall of the Roman Empire and the decimation of the Aztecs and the Incas by the Spanish and Portuguese conquistadors. An devastated First Nations peoples across Australia.
So the WHO breakthrough,after a global 10-year scientific effort,was unequivocally good news. But there was a footnote. With smallpox eradicated,WHO advised that mass-scale smallpox vaccination was no longer necessary.
Which brings us,40 years later,to monkeypox. The virus,related to smallpox,is until this year. It has been spreading over the northern summer predominately through gay men during the Pride and Circuit Party season. Now it has reached Australia.
The monkeypox virus is,as the says,“mired in misconception”. But its effects can be horrific. The pain can be if the lesions and ulcers spread internally through the mouth and anus and create abscesses.
Monkeypox may spread through skin-to-skin contact,respiratory droplets or contact with contaminated items or surfaces. It is not classified as a sexually transmitted disease,but can be spread when people are having sex due to close skin-to-skin contact. Researchers are trying to determine if it can spread via semen.
Health authorities are worried. The virus has been spreading locally with a few mystery cases. Numbers were small,but leapt suddenly in August.
It is easy to criticise the public health response. It is a familiar story to all of us who have lived through COVID-19. Contract tracing failed in some cases. Vaccines are in short supply,the public health messaging is not getting through.
Also familiar:the virus has spread more quickly in Melbourne than Sydney and officials don’t really know why.
Of our 23 locally acquired cases,. Days later,NSW announced one and two NSW residents had caught it while interstate. There have been more than since May.
What was so alarming for Victoria was that during August locally acquired cases jumped from about 25 per cent of all cases to 50 per cent of cases.
More vaccines are on their way and countries including the US are using a different injection method – intradermal rather than standard subcutaneous injection – to spread a single dose among more people. But nurses have not been widely trained to use that technique here.
Viruses are excellent at finding unvaccinated people. in London,New York and Jerusalem. There have been two cases of paralysis.
The spread of monkeypox is an additional reminder about the importance of vaccines and what can go wrong when they are not used.
“In the old days,when everyone was vaccinated against smallpox,there wouldn’t have been a chance of monkeypox spreading,” says Andrew Grulich,head of the HIV epidemiology and prevention program at the Kirby Institute at the University of New South Wales.
“We pay insufficient heed to the health of people in poor countries at our peril. We need vaccines everywhere – not just Melbourne and Sydney.”
This will become more acute as we head into summer and invite the LGBTQ world to Sydney for WorldPride in February.
Access to the monkeypox vaccine is heavily restricted – available only to those in high-risk categories. An extra 78,000 doses will arrive some time in September and about 350,000 doses will be available in 2023. Given what happened with COVID-19,we can ill afford another vaccine stroll out.