“In humans, monkeypox resolves on its own in a few weeks and it is, in severity, even less than chicken pox. “The reassurance comes from the epidemiologist Donato Greco, for 30 years at the head of the Epidemiology Laboratory of the Higher Institute of Health, then Director General of Prevention at the Ministry of Health, now a consultant WHO and former member of the CTS in the Covid emergency. “Indeed, chickenpox involves an extension of the vesicles all over the body and gives a high fever, while monkeypox is almost always very localized, in the cases we are talking about these days sexually transmitted pustules are limited to the genital area without high fever “.
Greco, one of the leading experts on health emergencies of the last 50 years – heard by time.news Salute – recalls having participated, at the very end of the 1980s, in Congo in a field investigation relating to an epidemic of monkeypox .
“It is only media science fiction that of those who foresee thousands and thousands of cases of monkeypox” says Greco, reducing “alarmism and unjustified panic”. And he argues that in this circumstance it is only necessary to carry out “a very thorough active surveillance with immediate isolation of the virus and above all genomic characterization of the viral isolates”. Because, he notes, “after the pandemic, any infectious alarm must rightly be taken seriously and attention is needed, given that much had been neglected before Covid, but that there is panic on the part of the population and forecasts of an epidemic with thousands and thousands of cases is not science but science fiction “.
Greco – who in the past participated in a field investigation in Congo relating to outbreaks of monkeypox, in addition to dealing with the last phase of the smallpox eradication programs and those post-eradication – explains from a scientific point of view the characteristics of these viruses. “Poxviruses are in all animals, we have pox of chickens, monkeys, cows, and transmission to humans is not excluded for almost any of these, but the transmission of monkeypox, known since the 1970s, in fact it has never been an epidemic, much less a pandemic “, he says.
Not only. “Today the first notions on the genome of the virus indicate that it is very stable, and it is thanks to this stability that smallpox has been eradicated. It is in fact a double-stranded DNA virus, which implies its structural stability, therefore much less subject to variations, unlike respiratory viruses which are single-helix RNA, which are very variable. This therefore – he explains – is a reason for reassurance “.