愛污传媒

Health

    • Silent spread of monkeypox may be a wakeup call for the world

    This 2003 electron microscope image made available by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows mature, oval-shaped monkeypox virions, left, and spherical immature virions, right, obtained from a sample of human skin associated with the 2003 prairie dog outbreak. (Cynthia S. Goldsmith, Russell Regner/CDC via AP) This 2003 electron microscope image made available by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows mature, oval-shaped monkeypox virions, left, and spherical immature virions, right, obtained from a sample of human skin associated with the 2003 prairie dog outbreak. (Cynthia S. Goldsmith, Russell Regner/CDC via AP)
    Share

    A monkeypox outbreak continues to grow in countries where the virus isn't normally found, putting global health officials on high alert.

    Now with more than 643 cases of monkeypox in dozens of countries where the virus is not endemic, "the sudden appearance of in many countries at the same time suggests there may have been undetected transmission for some time," World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Wednesday.

    The virus has been circulating for decades in some places, including parts of West and Central Africa. In early , scientists at the 鈥嬧婭nstitute of Evolutionary Biology at the University of Edinburgh described how the genetic pattern they're seeing suggests that "there has been sustained human to human transmission since at least 2017."

    In that research, genetic sequences showed that the first monkeypox cases in 2022 appear to have descended from an outbreak that resulted in cases in Singapore, Israel, Nigeria and the United Kingdom from 2017 to 2019.

    Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist and professor at the University of Arizona who was not involved in the research, said it suggests that "this outbreak has been going on for a long time, locally," as in where the virus is endemic. And it means the world has failed to protect those in resource-limited areas where it has been endemic and to control it at its source before it spread globally, he added.

    "It's really a tale of two outbreaks," Worobey said. "We need to actually turn our attention to where it's been spreading ... and start caring about that population just as much as we care about what's going on in all these other countries around the world."

    If research continues to show that the virus has spread more among humans than previously thought -- more distant from an animal source, that is -- Worobey said one "really good question" is, why wouldn't the world think monkeypox can be endemic in places beyond West and Central Africa?

    'We don't even know how long this has been spreading'

    Epidemiologist Anne Rimoin has been studying monkeypox for about two decades and has long warned that its spread in places like the Democratic Republic of the Congo could have broader global health implications.

    "If monkeypox were to become established in a wildlife reservoir outside Africa, the public health setback would be difficult to reverse," Rimoin, now a professor of epidemiology at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

    The latest monkeypox outbreak is proving difficult to predict in part because we haven't been able to fully trace its origins.

    "We don't even know how long this has been spreading," Rimoin said. "This could have been spreading silently for a while.

    "It's like we've now decided to watch a new series, but we don't know exactly which episode we've landed on. I mean, are we on episode two, or are we on episode four, or are we on episode 10? And how many episodes are in this series? We don't know."

    Previous human cases of monkeypox weren't thought to be too far removed from some initial exposure to an infected animal -- typically rodents. Once the virus is circulating among these animals, it can continue jumping back into humans who might come into contact with infected squirrels or guinea pigs, for example.

    If we continue to see sustained person-to-person transmission in this outbreak, even at low levels, that brings the possibility of a spillover back into animals in nonendemic countries from "an existential threat to a distinct possibility," Rimoin told CNN. Such a spillover could then allow the virus to remain in an environment, jumping between animals and humans over time.

    "Canon has been, monkeypox will burn itself out" after a short chain of human transmission, Rimoin said. However, although our knowledge of the virus goes back decades, it's now spreading among . For epidemiologists, that means keeping an open mind.

    "We know a fair amount about this virus, but we don't know everything about this virus," she said. "We're going to have to study this very carefully."

    Too early to tell

    WHO officials say the global public health risk is moderate.

    "The public health risk could become high if this virus exploits the opportunity to establish itself as a human pathogen and spreads to groups at higher risk of severe disease such as young children and immunosuppressed persons," according to a issued Sunday, which added that "immediate action from countries is required to control further spread among groups at risk, prevent spread to the general population and avert the establishment of monkeypox as a clinical condition and public health problem in currently non-endemic countries."

    In a news briefing last week, an official with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that it's "too early to tell" whether the virus could become endemic in the United States but that experts remain "hopeful" that won't happen.

    "I think we're in the very early days of our investigations," said Dr. Jennifer McQuiston, deputy director of the CDC's Division of High Consequence Pathogens and Pathology.

    McQuiston pointed out that the virus didn't become endemic after the in the United States, in 2003, when pet prairie dogs led to dozens of infected people across multiple states.

    "We're hopeful we'll be able to similarly contain this," McQuiston said.

    The European CDC appeared to agree with McQuiston last week, saying there's no evidence that the virus established itself in US wildlife after authorities conducted "an aggressive campaign for exposed animals during the 2003 outbreak."

    According to the European agency, "The probability of this spill-over event is very low."

    Still, it wouldn't be the first virus to take up residence in a US animal population, said Dr. Amesh Adalja, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security at the Bloomberg School of Public Health. , West Nile virus was unheard-of in the US. Now, it's the leading cause of mosquito-borne disease in the country.

    "It got seeded into mosquito populations and ... bird populations and was able to establish itself," Adalja said.

    Still, he agrees that this is far from an inevitability with monkeypox because "2003 was a good opportunity for it to happen" -- and it didn't.

    Worobey says there are too many unknowns to figure out where this monkeypox outbreak is headed.

    "What we're finding out here, in real time, is that we know very little about what's going on," he said, "and I think it's too early to be giving blanket reassurances."

    A different landscape

    It's not just murky beginnings and silent spread that make this monkeypox outbreak hard to predict.

    "It's just a very different epidemiological landscape," Rimoin added.

    "What we know about monkeypox comes largely from studies in very remote rural communities in Central Africa, where the transmission dynamics are bound to be very different," she said, especially compared with "high-resource settings in Europe or the US."

    And although a full-fledged pandemic isn't yet a concern, that doesn't mean certain groups aren't at risk, a WHO official said Monday.

    "At the moment, we are not concerned of a global pandemic," said Rosamund Lewis, technical lead for monkeypox at the WHO Health Emergencies Programme.

    However, "we are concerned that individuals may acquire this infection through high-risk exposure if they don't have the information they need to protect themselves," she said. "And we are concerned that, because the global population is not immune to orthopoxviruses since the end of smallpox eradication, that the virus may attempt to exploit a niche and spread more easily between people."

    Health authorities have warned that, although anyone can get the virus, appear to have a higher risk of exposure at the moment.

    "What we're seeing now began as a small cluster of cases, and then the investigation rapidly led to discovery of infections in a group of men who have sex with men ... and so we don't yet know what the source of the actual outbreak is," Lewis said Tuesday.

    "What's most important now is not to stigmatize," she said.

    A number of other lingering questions could also change our understanding of how well the virus spreads from person to person. For example, it's unclear how much spread there is when people have minimal symptoms or what effect mutations may have on the virus.

    On those points, Adalja said, there's no reason to be concerned yet.

    For one, the fact that doctors are seeing a number of cases with lesions in the groin area -- versus more common areas such as the face, hands and feet -- suggests to him that close contact with symptomatic people with skin lesions is more likely driving the spread, Adalja said.

    And although it's important to run down any viral mutations we see with monkeypox, this virus mutates relatively slowly because its genome is made of double-stranded DNA, which is more stable than, say, the single-stranded RNA of coronaviruses.

    The pace of those mutations seems to have sped up somewhat, Worobey said of the early Edinburgh research. However, the global outbreak probably has far more to do with the virus gaining access to new circles where it's easy to transmit and not "the relatively small number of mutations that have accumulated since 2017," he added.

    When it comes to whether the virus is currently changing in significant ways, "we don't have the answer to this. We don't really know," Lewis said last week.

    "We don't yet have evidence that there's mutation in the virus itself. We are beginning to collect that information," she said. "We will be convening our groups of virologists and other experts who will discuss this very question based on the sequence of the genome of some of the cases that are being detected."

    Meanwhile, health officials around the world continue to track cases and the contacts of those cases to better understand how the virus is spreading -- and how to stop it.

    "Right now," Rimoin said, "we have to do everything we can to stop community transmission."

    CTVNews.ca Top Stories

    Elections BC released its first partial results of the final count in B.C.'s 2024 provincial election Saturday afternoon, and the data shows NDP candidates gaining in some tight races.

    Huntsville OPP and the Special Investigations Unit (SIU) are conducting a homicide investigation after three individuals were found dead in a Huntsville neighbourhood Friday evening.

    Angela Salvatore had been away from her father's hospital bedside for just over an hour when she says she got a frantic call from a nurse, pleading with her to calm him down.

    Ontario Provincial Police say a 16-year-old has been charged with second-degree murder after a 15-year-old was found dead at a home in Perth, Ont. Friday afternoon.

    Canadian Ryan James Wedding finished in 24th place in the parallel giant slalom at the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City, but the snowboarder wouldn鈥檛 go on to improve his results in Torino four years later.

    A veteran Ottawa journalist is firing back against what he says are "entirely false" claims by a former Conservative cabinet minister that he acted as a Russian agent.

    Canada

    • Huntsville OPP and the Special Investigations Unit (SIU) are conducting a homicide investigation after three individuals were found dead in a Huntsville neighbourhood Friday evening.

    • Elections BC released its first partial results of the final count in B.C.'s 2024 provincial election Saturday afternoon, and the data shows NDP candidates gaining in some tight races.

    • Ontario Provincial Police say a 16-year-old has been charged with second-degree murder after a 15-year-old was found dead at a home in Perth, Ont. Friday afternoon.

    • The mystery of a 100-year-old letter sent from Manitoba to Ireland is slowly unraveling thanks to the work of one amateur sleuth.

    • Canadian Ryan James Wedding finished in 24th place in the parallel giant slalom at the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City, but the snowboarder wouldn鈥檛 go on to improve his results in Torino four years later.

    World

    Politics

    Health

    Sci-Tech

    Entertainment

    Business

    Lifestyle

    Sports

    • Former Chicago Blackhawks star and Hall of Fame hockey executive Bill Hay, who was also a past president and CEO of the Calgary Flames, has died. He was 88.

    • Stuart Skinner made 27 saves for his fifth career shutout and Evan Bouchard and Mattias Ekholm each had a goal and an assist as the Edmonton Oilers snapped a two-game losing skid with a 4-0 victory over the Pittsburgh Penguins on Friday.

    Autos

    Local Spotlight

    A new resident at a Manitoba animal rescue has waddled her way into people's hearts.

    Hundreds of people ran to the music of German composer and pianist Beethoven Wednesday night in a unique race in Halifax.

    He is a familiar face to residents of a neighbourhood just west of Roncesvalles Avenue.

    A meteor lit up our region's sky last night 鈥 with a large fireball shooting across the horizon over Lake Erie at around 7:00 p.m.

    Residents of Ottawa's Rideauview neighbourhood say an aggressive wild turkey has become a problem.

    A man who lost his life while trying to rescue people from floodwaters, and a 13-year-old boy who saved his family from a dog attack, are among the Nova Scotians who received a medal for bravery Tuesday.

    A newly minted Winnipegger is hoping a world record attempt will help bring awareness for the need for more pump track facilities in the city.

    A Springfield, Ont. man is being hailed a 'hero' after running into his burning home to save his two infant children.

    Hortense Anglin was the oldest graduate to make her way across the platform at York University's Fall Convocation ceremony this week. At the age of 87, she graduated with an Honours degree in Religious Studies.

    • Elections BC released its first partial results of the final count in B.C.'s 2024 provincial election Saturday afternoon, and the data shows NDP candidates gaining in some tight races.

    • Three people have suffered serious but non-life-threatening injuries following a stabbing at a New Westminster casino in the early hours of Saturday morning.

    • Work crews were called to deal with a barge that appeared to be stuck near the shore of the Fraser River in Langley Saturday morning.

    • Canadian Ryan James Wedding finished in 24th place in the parallel giant slalom at the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City, but the snowboarder wouldn鈥檛 go on to improve his results in Torino four years later.

    • Huntsville OPP and the Special Investigations Unit (SIU) are conducting a homicide investigation after three individuals were found dead in a Huntsville neighbourhood Friday evening.

    • Seneca Polytechnic says it is temporarily closing one of its campuses north of Toronto because of the federal government's recent cuts to the number of international student permits.

    • One person is in hospital with potentially life-threatening injuries after a crash between a motorized scooter and a vehicle.

    • Mr. Steam got its online business listing back.

    • One person is in hospital in stable condition following a shooting in southeast Calgary at around 2 a.m. Saturday morning.

    • NEW THIS MORNING

      NEW THIS MORNING

      Atl茅tico Ottawa will have their first shot in their quest to hoist the North Star cup on Sunday.

    • Ontario Provincial Police say a 16-year-old has been charged with second-degree murder after a 15-year-old was found dead at a home in Perth, Ont. Friday afternoon.

    • A veteran Ottawa journalist is firing back against what he says are "entirely false" claims by a former Conservative cabinet minister that he acted as a Russian agent.

    • Montreal police (SPVM) are investigating an alleged case of voyeurism on the metro involving an 18-year-old woman, with video footage of the incident now circulating on social media

    • CAA Quebec hosted a child car seat safety check in Laval to promote the importance of proper installation and prevent potential tragedies on the road.

    • Steve Begin is back at school, speaking to students. A place the former Montreal Canadien says was difficult for him growing up.

    • RCMP are looking for a man they believe is armed and dangerous in the Lac La Biche area.

    • A worker was killed on the job in Stony Plain on Tuesday, one day after a worker was killed in northwest Edmonton.

    • A former Alberta teacher has been sentenced to four years for sexually abusing a student.

    • Hundreds of people got dressed up Saturday for an afternoon of trick-or-treating in East Chezzetcook, N.S., during the fourth annual 鈥楬alloween Trick or Treat on the Trail Walk.鈥

    • The GoFundMe page for the family of an employee found dead at a Halifax Walmart last weekend has paused donations after almost $200,000 was raised in roughly 24 hours.

    • This weekend brings Menahqesk PowWow 2024 to Saint John, N.B., the first traditional powwow to be held in the city.

    • Winnipeg police have arrested and charged a man believed to be connected with an assault at a University of Manitoba dorm room.

    • The mystery of a 100-year-old letter sent from Manitoba to Ireland is slowly unraveling thanks to the work of one amateur sleuth.

    • Pop culture connoisseurs made their way by the masses to the fourth annual Winnipeg Comiccon this weekend.

    • The Calgary Stampeders picked up their first road victory of the season Saturday, defeating the Saskatchewan Roughriders 27-12 in the final regular-season game of the year.

    • Saskatchewan was one of the regions that experienced one of the hottest heat waves in Canada this summer, according to Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC).

    • A group of Regina youth gathered to give back to veterans of the First World War.

    • Police are investigating after a Guelph home was broken into early Saturday morning.

    • Fire crews responded to a fire at a Waterloo waste management site Friday evening.

    • All the evidence has now been called at the trial of Erick Buhr, who has pleaded not guilty to second degree murder in the death of his grandmother, Viola Erb.

    • Saskatoon fire crews responded to a major house fire on the 400 block of 24th Street West on Friday evening.

    • The Saskatoon Police Service is cautioning residents about a phone scam involving fraudulent lottery claims.

    • The Calgary Stampeders picked up their first road victory of the season Saturday, defeating the Saskatchewan Roughriders 27-12 in the final regular-season game of the year.

    • Huntsville OPP and the Special Investigations Unit (SIU) are conducting a homicide investigation after three individuals were found dead in a Huntsville neighbourhood Friday evening.

    • Creditors have moved to take ownership of most of the properties in northern Ontario owned by a group of 11 insolvent companies.

    • The Town of Cochrane plans to roll out its $10-lot program in a month or two.

    • London police say they鈥檝e arrested a man allegedly responsible for a number of non-fatal overdoses that prompted a safety warning Friday afternoon.

    • Cornelius Woelke and his two boys, who were badly burned in a fire in Springfield, Ont., are continuing their recovery in hospital.

    • Alongside a panel of industry experts, Ontario NDP Leader Marit Stiles joined MPP Terence Kernaghan to discuss hot button topics leading up to a possible election.

    • Huntsville OPP and the Special Investigations Unit (SIU) are conducting a homicide investigation after three individuals were found dead in a Huntsville neighbourhood Friday evening.

    • A commercial truck driver was stopped for allegedly travelling nearly twice the speed limit through a community safe zone in Caledon Saturday morning.

    • Several students have been banned from being spectators at school sporting events, and others suspended from school, after verbal and physical exchanges at a high school soccer game.

    • Windsor police say the death of a 69-year-old man has been ruled a homicide.

    • A U.S. citizen was arrested by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers at the Gorder Howe International Bridge on Oct. 18 for an active warrant for possession of synthetic drugs.

    • Witches and dinosaurs walked the Downtown Windsor Farmers鈥 Market Saturday morning in search of an early Halloween treat.

    • Elections BC released its first partial results of the final count in B.C.'s 2024 provincial election Saturday afternoon, and the data shows NDP candidates gaining in some tight races.

    • There were tense moments at a ferry terminal outside Victoria, B.C., on Friday after the lion鈥檚 share of standby spots on an early sailing were claimed by 鈥渁ssured loading鈥 passengers 鈥 leaving regular customers who had been waiting for hours out of luck.

    • Hulitan Early Years Centre is a brand new, 48-seat childhood learning centre in Colwood. It was built to support Indigenous children throughout the capital region.

    • More than two years after Alannah Brown and Douglas Barker were found dead north of Penticton, police are asking for help identifying a vehicle they believe was associated with the crime.

    • Dave Lindsey began growing giant pumpkins to bring a bit of magic to his grandkids' Halloween.

    • A U.S. District Court judge in Montana has sentenced a 27-year-old man from Kelowna, B.C., to 18 months in prison for using fake names to buy guns with the aim of selling them in Canada.

    • A tentative agreement has been reached between the City of Lethbridge and more than 900 employees belonging to CUPE Local 70.

    • The Hurricanes will be happy to be back home in Lethbridge Saturday night after losing their third in a row on the road Friday night, a 4-1 decision to the Broncos in Swift Current.

    • About 15,000 students are enrolled at Lethbridge鈥檚 post-secondary schools, and now the city is working with those schools to try to find ways to get them s to stick around a while.

    • Creditors have moved to take ownership of most of the properties in northern Ontario owned by a group of 11 insolvent companies.

    • Ontario Provincial Police have been cleared in the case of a woman who crashed her vehicle intentionally while she was high on drugs and fled into the woods earlier this year.

    • The union that represents hospital workers across the province is used a symbol from Greek mythology Friday in Espanola to drive home its campaign about the perils of privatization in health care.

    N.L.

    Shopping Trends

    The Shopping Trends team is independent of the journalists at 愛污传媒. We may earn a commission when you use our links to shop.聽Read about us.

    Stay Connected
    Follow 愛污传媒