Health
New coronavirus may be no more dangerous than the flu, despite worldwide alarm: experts – National Post
If one thing has spread faster than the new coronavirus from Wuhan, China, it is worldwide fear of the novel bug.
Surgical masks are being hoarded in Toronto, borders closed in Russia and conspiracy theories disseminated far and wide on Twitter.
Meanwhile, the massive quarantines imposed in China are starting to threaten the global economy.
But as evidence of the severity and transmissabilty of 2019-nCoV trickles in, infectious-disease experts say it’s appearing less menacing than first thought, maybe more like seasonal flu than, say, SARS.
The apparently high mortality rates that dominated headlines initially have shrunk as the number of infections grows, and many of the infected appear to have mild or no symptoms.
To some scientists, the situation is reminiscent of the H1N1 pandemic flu of 2009, which burst onto the scene with a frightening spate of deaths in Mexico, only to be viewed as relatively innocuous by the time it petered out for the season.
“Upfront, what you tend to see is probably an over-representation of severe cases that are getting reported,” said Jason Kindrachuk, Canada Research Chair in emerging viruses at the University of Manitoba.
The people who bring a new infection to the fore are those ill enough to seek medical help and get tested, he noted.
“But there are probably a ton of cases in the background that people just thought were mild cases of flu.”
Kindrachuk and other scientists stress that the jury is still out on the new coronavirus, and say that even if it turns out to be a relatively mild disease, health authorities are right to take it very seriously.
But the sense that the media, public and some nations have over-reacted is beginning to seep into conversation.
The current global panic in reaction to the emergence of a fairly mild new virus is wholly unjustified
Beijing’s Foreign Affairs Ministry spokeswoman complained Monday about the U.S. decision to ban anyone who had been in China recently, accusing it of spreading fear while not actually helping the country most affected by the virus.
In a news release Sunday, the Federation of International Employers urged more calm to avoid economic dislocation and a world recession.
“The current global panic in reaction to the emergence of a fairly mild new virus is wholly unjustified and amounts to mass hysteria,” complained the human resources association, chaired by a Ford Motors executive.
As of Monday, the World Health Organization reported 17,391 laboratory-confirmed cases of the new coronavirus worldwide — the vast majority in China — and 362 deaths.
That’s a death rate of two per cent, several times that of the seasonal flu in places like Canada, and much less than two other recently emerging coronaviruses: SARS (10 per cent); and the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome or MERS (35 per cent).
But a recent article by University of Hong scientists published by the journal Lancet suggested the actual number of people infected is far higher. Their paper analyzed travel patterns in China and known cases of the virus and used mathematical formula to estimate that more like 75,000 people had contracted the bug there as of Jan. 28.
A child Manila, Philippines, wears a facemask amid public fear over the Wuhan coronavirus, Feb. 3, 2020.
That certainly would back up evidence that it spreads faster than SARS or MERS. But based on the number of reported deaths when the paper was published Friday, it would actually produce a mortality rate of just .2 per cent — akin to that of influenzas.
“We don’t freak out about seasonal flu, we experience it every year,” said Matthew Miller, a microbiologist who studies viruses at McMaster University. “The people most likely to die from seasonal flu are the elderly and the very young … The same is very likely to be true with this new coronavirus outbreak. The people who are at highest risk are the people at the highest risk for any type of infection.”
Canada has recorded four cases of the new pathogen, all individuals who had travelled recently to Wuhan.
Of course, even seasonal flu takes a heavy toll, and the Wuhan coronavirus is dispersing among a human population never exposed to it before, meaning people have no immunity.
“If we were not to take any kind of precautions … most of us would end up infected by it,” said Darryl Falzarano, a microbiologist at the University of Saskatchewan who is working on a vaccine for 2019-nCoV. “Are you OK with one in a hundred or one in a thousand people not surviving?”
The goal is to contain the new virus, to essentially snuff it out. But what if that were not possible and it became a regular part of the pool of human infectious disease?
The pathogen would not actually replace seasonal flus, but might not add much to the total amount of respiratory illness, said Miller. The body’s immune system produces both specific and general responses to a virus. That general immune response provides some latent, short-term protection against contracting another bug, he said.
And the number of deaths would likely end up similar to the respiratory-virus toll now, the same vulnerable parts of the population falling victim to either the flu or the novel coronavirus, suggested Miller.
US’ health emergency declaration may come too late to halt spread, experts say
The administration of US President Joe Biden on Thursday declared the country’s monkeypox outbreak a public health emergency, but many health experts fear that it may be too late to contain the spread of infections.
Criticism of the White House’s response to the disease outbreak has been building, with experts saying the authorities have been slow off the mark in distributing treatments and vaccines.
The White House’s declaration signals that the monkeypox virus now represents a significant risk to citizens. The Secretary of Health and Human Services, Xavier Becerra, is considering a second declaration that would empower federal officials to expedite medical countermeasures, such as other potential treatments and vaccines, without going through comprehensive federal reviews.
That also would allow for greater flexibility in how the current supply of vaccines is administered, Becerra said.
Some 6,600 monkeypox infections have been reported in the United States, a number that has risen sharply over the past weeks.
Lawrence Gostin, a public health law expert at Georgetown University, said the declaration of the health emergency “signals the US government’s seriousness and purpose, and sounds a global alarm”. But he told The Associated Press that the action was overdue.
Gostin said the government has been too cautious and should have declared a nationwide emergency earlier.
On July 23, the World Health Organization declared a global health emergency over the outbreak, with cases in more than 70 countries.
California, Illinois and New York have all made declarations recently, as have New York City, San Francisco and San Diego County.
Since doctors diagnosed the first US case on May 27, the virus has been spreading rapidly in the country, with the highest rates per capita reported in Washington, New York and Georgia.
More than 99 percent of the infections are among men who have sex with men.
The virus is transmitted mostly during close physical contact. So far, no deaths from the disease have been reported in the US.
The country now has the highest case count among nonendemic countries, and the number is expected to rise as surveillance and testing improve.
Monkeypox is endemic in parts of Africa, where people have been infected through bites from rodents or small animals. Classification as endemic means a disease has a constant presence in a population but is not affecting an alarmingly large number of people, as typically seen in a pandemic.
‘Rarely fatal’
On its website, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says of the virus: “Monkeypox virus is part of the same family of viruses as variola virus, the virus that causes smallpox. Monkeypox symptoms are similar to smallpox symptoms, but milder, and monkeypox is rarely fatal. Monkeypox is not related to chickenpox.”
There is increasing concern that the US may have lost its chance to contain the monkeypox virus. Some public health experts have pointed fingers at the administration for its slowness in rolling out vaccines and treatments.
“The window for containing monkeypox is rapidly closing,” Gostin warned in an interview with CNN late last month. He had called for the US to declare a national public health emergency and make more vaccine doses available.
“I do think it’s still possible to contain, but it’s also equally possible that this may become endemic in the United States,” he said.
Supplies of a monkeypox vaccine called Jynneos have been limited even as demand surges. The administration has been criticized for moving too slowly to expand the number of doses.
Federal officials have identified about 1.6 million people as being at the highest risk for monkeypox, but the US has received enough Jynneos doses to fully cover only about 550,000 people.
The shortage of vaccines was caused in part because the Department of Health and Human Services failed early on to ask that bulk stocks of the vaccine it already owned be bottled for distribution, reported The New York Times, citing multiple unnamed administration officials familiar with the matter.
The government is now distributing about 1.1 million vaccine doses, less than a third of the 3.5 million that health officials now estimate are needed to fight the outbreak. It does not expect the next delivery, of 500,000 doses, until October.
US’ health emergency declaration may come too late to halt spread, experts say
The administration of US President Joe Biden on Thursday declared the country’s monkeypox outbreak a public health emergency, but many health experts fear that it may be too late to contain the spread of infections.
Criticism of the White House’s response to the disease outbreak has been building, with experts saying the authorities have been slow off the mark in distributing treatments and vaccines.
The White House’s declaration signals that the monkeypox virus now represents a significant risk to citizens. The Secretary of Health and Human Services, Xavier Becerra, is considering a second declaration that would empower federal officials to expedite medical countermeasures, such as other potential treatments and vaccines, without going through comprehensive federal reviews.
That also would allow for greater flexibility in how the current supply of vaccines is administered, Becerra said.
Some 6,600 monkeypox infections have been reported in the United States, a number that has risen sharply over the past weeks.
Lawrence Gostin, a public health law expert at Georgetown University, said the declaration of the health emergency “signals the US government’s seriousness and purpose, and sounds a global alarm”. But he told The Associated Press that the action was overdue.
Gostin said the government has been too cautious and should have declared a nationwide emergency earlier.
On July 23, the World Health Organization declared a global health emergency over the outbreak, with cases in more than 70 countries.
California, Illinois and New York have all made declarations recently, as have New York City, San Francisco and San Diego County.
Since doctors diagnosed the first US case on May 27, the virus has been spreading rapidly in the country, with the highest rates per capita reported in Washington, New York and Georgia.
More than 99 percent of the infections are among men who have sex with men.
The virus is transmitted mostly during close physical contact. So far, no deaths from the disease have been reported in the US.
The country now has the highest case count among nonendemic countries, and the number is expected to rise as surveillance and testing improve.
Monkeypox is endemic in parts of Africa, where people have been infected through bites from rodents or small animals. Classification as endemic means a disease has a constant presence in a population but is not affecting an alarmingly large number of people, as typically seen in a pandemic.
‘Rarely fatal’
On its website, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says of the virus: “Monkeypox virus is part of the same family of viruses as variola virus, the virus that causes smallpox. Monkeypox symptoms are similar to smallpox symptoms, but milder, and monkeypox is rarely fatal. Monkeypox is not related to chickenpox.”
There is increasing concern that the US may have lost its chance to contain the monkeypox virus. Some public health experts have pointed fingers at the administration for its slowness in rolling out vaccines and treatments.
“The window for containing monkeypox is rapidly closing,” Gostin warned in an interview with CNN late last month. He had called for the US to declare a national public health emergency and make more vaccine doses available.
“I do think it’s still possible to contain, but it’s also equally possible that this may become endemic in the United States,” he said.
Supplies of a monkeypox vaccine called Jynneos have been limited even as demand surges. The administration has been criticized for moving too slowly to expand the number of doses.
Federal officials have identified about 1.6 million people as being at the highest risk for monkeypox, but the US has received enough Jynneos doses to fully cover only about 550,000 people.
The shortage of vaccines was caused in part because the Department of Health and Human Services failed early on to ask that bulk stocks of the vaccine it already owned be bottled for distribution, reported The New York Times, citing multiple unnamed administration officials familiar with the matter.
The government is now distributing about 1.1 million vaccine doses, less than a third of the 3.5 million that health officials now estimate are needed to fight the outbreak. It does not expect the next delivery, of 500,000 doses, until October.
Health unit to host monkeypox clinic Sunday
File photo courtesy of © Can Stock Photo / jbruiz
August 6, 2022 6:00am
The Windsor-Essex County Health Unit is making a limited supply of the monkeypox vaccine available.
The health unit will set up a monkeypox vaccine clinic on Sunday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Windsor-Essex PrideFest, centred at Lanspeary Park. Acting Medical Officer of Health Doctor Shanker Nesathurai said the clinic will be geared toward high-risk individuals.
“The term is sometimes described as ‘pre-exposure prophylaxis’, and that will be offered at the Pride event this coming weekend,” Nesathurai said during a media briefing Friday morning.
Chief Nursing Officer Felicia Lawal said the health unit will work with PrideFest and Pozitive Pathways to operate the mobile clinic.
“Public health nurses will be available to provide health information and resources on monkeypox, as well as pre-exposure vaccination for those who meet criteria and qualify,” said Lawal.
Nesathurai said the health unit will have about a hundred doses available at the clinic, and that the unit had distributed monkeypox vaccines in the past.
The health unit also emphasized that even though the biggest risk group continues to be men who have sex with men, anyone can get the virus, which can be transmitted through close contact. Nesathurai added that the PrideFest clinic will be the best way to raise as much awareness of the virus as possible, but the health unit is working not to stigmatize any segment of the population.
So far, there has been just one confirmed case of monkeypox in Windsor-Essex.
Complete information about monkeypox and vaccines can be found on the health unit’s official website.
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