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You are here: Home / Open Threads / Excellent Links / Open Thread: Don’t Worry — Monkeypox Is Neither Smallpox Nor Ebola

Open Thread: Don’t Worry — Monkeypox Is Neither Smallpox Nor Ebola

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*Now* aren’t you glad you listened to the flight attendant, and kept your mask on?…

A case of monkeypox has been confirmed in a Texas resident who had flown to Atlanta from Nigeria on July 8, with a final destination of Dallas Love Field Airport on July 9, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday. It is the first case of the virus seen in the United States in nearly two decades.

The patient is hospitalized in isolation in Dallas and is in stable condition, health officials with the Dallas County Health and Human Services said…

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is helping to contact the patient’s fellow passengers and assessing their potential risks.

“This is another demonstration of the importance of maintaining a strong public health infrastructure, as we are only a plane ride away from any global infectious disease,” Dr. Philip Huang, director of the Dallas County Health and Human Services, said in a press release…

… Most monkeypox outbreaks have occurred in Africa. In addition to Nigeria, outbreaks have also been reported in nine other countries in central and western Africa since 1970. Monkeypox also caused a large outbreak in people in the United States in 2003 after the virus spread from imported African rodents to pet prairie dogs, with 47 reported human cases…


Great, illustrated story from 2017 — well worth the click:

… The United States experienced a monkeypox outbreak in 2003. An exotic pet dealer imported 800 animals from Africa, including giant pouched rats, dormice and rope squirrels. While the animals were housed in a facility in Illinois, some of them infected prairie dogs that were later sold as pets. Forty-seven people in six Midwestern states were sickened, all of whom recovered. The youngest was a 3-year-old girl bitten on the finger by her new pet prairie dog…

Despite its name, monkeypox is probably not spread by monkeys. It was discovered in research monkeys in Denmark in 1958. Giant pouched rats, dormice and squirrels are the chief suspects, but there could be others…

Reader Interactions

61Comments

  1. 1.

    Cermet

    So the people on the plane are very likely safe because …wait for it … they were wearing masks mandated by the Covid precautions! Maybe this is something that should be required from now on. Look what it can do to help prevent an outbreak of a virus. And in the future, this will occur more and more often.

  3. 3.

    Ramalama

    Rick Perlstein, author of many dead-to-rights books on American history is celebrating his book Reaganland’s anniversary. This might be of interest to some of youse who talk about books here at BalloonJuice Central:

    Paperback arrives in a month–absent the embarrassing errors that marred the hardcover (save a pesky one on p. 718). To celebrate that, and my 24 years of work on the series, Zooming into the first 24 book clubs who ask. Love to meet my dear readers!

    I’m a facebook friend of his so that’s where I saw it. I guess hitting me up to hit him up is the way to go. But I won’t bother him with the actual details of how to do that, unless someone here actually wants to zoom with him about the book. Or maybe just hit him up using twitter or an email to him directly. It’s not facebook-specific.

  5. 5.

    artem1s

    After imploring folks to self report their vaccinations for months and failing to reach an 80% compliance so we could return to work w/o masking, the U finally laid down the law yesterday and announced mandated proof of vaccination to return to campus. As I suspected, faculty had the lowest rates of self reporting and were the reason most departments couldn’t reach even 60%. Yesterday was the first time The President’s office shared that bit of info. Dumbasses always need to flaunt their social status and inability perform the simplest administrative task themselves. The U has so many policies and practices that were designed around the fact that certain employees won’t perform any task that looks like secretarial work, including recording their own vacation and sick time. Low reporting on vaccination probably had more to do with tenured faculty not being able to figure out how to navigate the HR login to upload their vaccine cards as it did vaccine hesitancy.

  6. 6.

    dr. bloor

    Verrrry clever of the Chinese to let Monkeypox leak out of a Nigerian lab to divert our attention from the COVID leak in Wuhan.

    Prove me wrong!

  7. 7.

    RandomMonster

    @tom: People keep prairie dogs as pets??

    Seems cruel to me to keep a significantly social creature that spends a lot of time in burrows as a pet.

  8. 8.

    Uncle Cosmo

    I spent a couple of years working in “Prairie Dog Heaven**” and didn’t get infected even though I only wore a mask on Halloween, so there. ;^p

    ** A forest of cubicles with walls a little over 5′ high. Whenever there was a loud noise a couple dozen heads would bob up above the dividers like prairie dogs popping up from their burrows and look around for the source.

  9. 9.

    jimmiraybob

    How long do you think it will take in Texas for state and local Republican Party officials to demand that the Monkeypox people’s hero be immediately released from unconstitutional Commie-Marxist-BLM-ANTIFA and radical-leftist-Democrat imposed hospital detention all the while under threat of being offered effective live-saving treatment?

  11. 11.

    Chetan Murthy

    @jimmiraybob: Heh, uh, if he’s of African descent, which appears likely from the info we have, I’d say the twelfth of never; more likely they’ll go with “ooga-booga Ebola!”

  14. 14.

    Brachiator

    Monkeypox also caused a large outbreak in people in the United States in 2003

    Who knew that we would ever say something like “Remember the good old days when we had monkeypox?”

    I think I recall some David Letterman jokes about it.

  15. 15.

    Immanentize

    @RandomMonster: But what if you yourself were a social creature who liked to spend almost all their time in a burrow?

    ETA I was thinking Ozarkhillbilly when writing this, but he would certainly object to being “social.” Except with his family? Well, at least his grandkids….

  17. 17.

    Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes

    @jimmiraybob:

    Speaking of quarantines, apparently vile English troll Katie Hopkins has managed to get a travel exemption to Australia (ahead of 10s of thousands of actual Australians) and is apparently flouting hotel quarantine rules in SYD while spreading antivax nonsense.

    She may think she can hide behind her 2018 insolvency on fines and costs, but she may find herself completely fucked as to fines and deportation.

  18. 18.

    Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes

    Oh, and I learned this week that vile troll William Regnery died earlier in the month, so we have that going for us, which is nice.

  19. 19.

    NotMax

    FYI.

    All students at Hawaiʻi’s 257 public schools will receive free breakfast and lunch meals for the entirety of the 2021-22 school year, thanks to a nationwide waiver from the US Department of Agriculture, the Department of Education announced….

    The waiver aims to minimize the possible spread of COVID-19 at schools across the country by eliminating meal payment transactions in school cafeterias, settings where students and cashiers may not be able to maintain proper social distancing. Federal funds will reimburse state education departments for meal costs. Source

  24. 24.

    Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes

    @germy:

    They need to really sit them down to have that talk about using protection at all times unless in a committed monogamous equine relationship…..

  34. 34.

    Another Scott

    @Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:

    Obligatory…

    One of my favorite moments was being in a car in LA and seeing a bumper sticker on the car in front with praying hands and "Ezekiel 23:19-20."

    I laughed with such glee, delighted in the fact that they didn't care how many people got the joke, but that I had.

    — Mrs. Betty Bowers (@BettyBowers) July 15, 2021

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  35. 35.

    MomSense

    I’m procrastinating weeding my garden and watching The Good Fight.  The best thing to happen to TV is the addition of great Broadway actors.

  37. 37.

    NotMax

    @MomSense

    The best thing to happen to TV is the addition of great Broadway actors.

    Never saw that hot mess of a show with Nathan Lane cast as a former opera singer who was also known for being a prolific womanizer, didja?

    ;)

  41. 41.

    NotMax

    @MomSense

    Yeah. Definitely falls head first into the “WTF were they thinking?” bin.

    On the other hand, Kristin Chenoweth was a hoot as Olive Snook on Pushing Daisies. And while normally ambivalent about her, liked Bernadette Peters on Mozart in the Jungle.

  44. 44.

    germy

    Despite its name, monkeypox is probably not spread by monkeys. It was discovered in research monkeys in Denmark in 1958. Giant pouched rats, dormice and squirrels are the chief suspects, but there could be others…

     

    Something about them calling it monkey pox from ni ger ia feels racist pic.twitter.com/SfeHMCaNnf— Areola Grande (@Pinky_Balboa) July 16, 2021

  47. 47.

    Catherine D.

    @artem1s: Huh, Cornell faculty are 98% vaccinated, grad/professional students 97%, undergrads 95%. It’s staff at 84% that drag the number down to 90%.

  50. 50.

    Almost Retired

    I don’t know what a Giant Pouched Rat is — or if “giant” refers to the size of the rat or its pouch – but I hope we don’t have any of those around here.

  54. 54.

    trollhattan

    @artem1s:

    My employer is working at getting us back into the building–halftime at first and then full. And yet, and yet, California and especially this county have increases in infections, hospitalizations, ICU cases, deaths. New vaccinations have dropped off to nearly zero and fewer than half the eligible population are fully vaccinated.

    We have a (twice-rescheduled) Zoom townhall Monday on the topic. Hoping they’ve come to their senses WRT requiring, rather than suggesting vaccinations for resuming work. I can relatively easily distance myself from jerks in day-to-day life but being boxed up with them forty hours/week is a whole other story.

  56. 56.

    trnc

    Over 50 comments on an Ebola-adjacent story, and no mention of Rand Paul yet?

    I don’t even recognize this place anymore.

  61. 61.

    persistentillusion

    @Ceci n est pas mon nym: The Regnerys are far more loathsome that you know.  The paterfamilias lived in my hometown.  He had established a trust for his demented mother.  I was one of the Trust Officers assigned to the account and it was apparent that he was field-stripping his mother’s assets.  Couldn’t even wait for her passing.  The whole family was widely reviled.​
      ETA and there were a lot of them, all horribly greedy and dismissive of the little people (i.e. anyone not fortunate enough to be a Regnery. And their publishing house put out rascist, homophobic and sexist tracts by the cubic yardfull.

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