(tense staccato music) - I was having a lot of fatigue and body aches. I just thought it was exhaustion from traveling. But the next morning I woke up with rashes all over my hands.
The lesions started spreading to the more usual suspect areas, so that really made the doctors sort of confirm that what I had was monkeypox. - [Narrator] Kevin Kwong believes he was first infected in late June, about a month after monkeypox cases began to be reported in the U. S.
- It was sort of this, like, mystery disease. I think I approached things cautiously, but at the same time, I wasn't even sure what to be aware of. - [Narrator] By late July, the World Health Organization declared it a global health emergency, their highest level of alert.
- It will not be the next COVID-19 pandemic, but as a public health professional, I am very worried about what's unfolding, because this has the possibility to become a new virus that circulates regularly. - [Narrator] So how does monkeypox spread and what can be done to contain this outbreak? It's called monkeypox because it was first detected in research monkeys and because it's closely related to smallpox.
- The way I think about smallpox, it's the human version of monkeypox. It's not engineered to exploit human cells and human bodies. We're like an accidental host.
- [Narrator] Monkeypox is endemic to parts of Africa where it mostly circulates among rodents. Occasionally, from close interactions, like hunting or eating, monkeypox will spread from an animal to a human, and in May of 2022, someone showing symptoms traveled from Nigeria to the United Kingdom. Soon after, other cases began appearing in the U.
K. , then Portugal, Sweden, the U. S.
- Previously the outbreaks were fairly limited. Epidemiologists were able to bring it under control. In the current outbreak, it's spreading fairly efficiently between humans, primarily through sexual contact.
- [Narrator] When infected, monkeypox gets into your bloodstream and creates lesions on the skin. While it can spread through respiratory droplets or bodily fluids, with this 2022 outbreak, it's rare. The most common way it spreads is through skin-to-skin contact with those lesions.
- We know that during intimate contact or cuddling, et cetera, you make these micro-abrasions in the skin. You can't really see it a lot of times, but they're there. So the virus just jumps from the person who has it, and there's tons of it, into one of these micro-abrasions.
- [Narrator] Once infected, it can take a while for symptoms to appear. That can happen as soon as five days after infection to nearly three weeks after, but they usually appear around here, and these first few days of symptoms look like a typical illness as your immune system kicks in to begin fighting the disease: fever, headache, fatigue, and even the swelling of your lymph nodes. It's after that, that the rash and lesions typically begin, especially on the hands and face.
With the outbreak that began in 2022, the lesions appeared differently. They can be localized more on the genitals and even appear more like bumps, something that not all medical professionals are trained to identify. - [Kevin] Even when I went into Urgent Care, they told me that this was definitely not monkeypox, because the way that monkeypox had been appearing in photos that they've received, were larger lesions, umbilicated, so kind of like donut-shaped, all throughout the body, and I just didn't have any of that at the time.
- People thought to have visible rashes, like what you'd see in the textbooks, were these huge boils on people's arms, but they could be very, very subtle. - [Narrator] Dr Chin-Hong was able to diagnose and prescribe Kevin TPOXX, an antiviral medication that the government already had stockpiled. - [Caitlin] There was a lot of preparedness, particularly after the September 11th attacks and the anthrax mailings, that went into preparing for smallpox.
We had a lot of tools already in the arsenal to fight smallpox but that also worked for monkeypox. - [Narrator] The stockpile includes an approved vaccine. U.
S. authorities are testing already-made doses and ordering 2. 5 million more.
- And so we are in a relatively good position against this virus than we would be against a virus that we had never prepared for before, but we need to make sure that we use those tools appropriately and aggressively in order to bring this virus under control. - [Narrator] The vaccine can also be used as part of the treatment. If given within four days after the exposure, it can prevent the infection or at least make it less severe.
- You can develop your antibodies, because it's, like, so slow, because it's trying to find a rat and it's a human. - [Narrator] The vaccines to come available have been restricted to the community monkeypox is affecting most: men who have sex with men. - Among the 6,000 cases currently reported to the World Health Organization, 98% are in men who have sex with men, but we also want to be very careful not to stigmatize the disease or to give the impression that it is exclusively and forever limited to men who have sex with men, because that's not the case.
- It's a human virus. It can attack anyone. - [Narrator] Public health officials are concerned about the virus spreading to other vulnerable groups, like children or even U.
S. animals, which is why the messaging is the same as the last outbreak we saw: "Stop the spread and get vaccinated.
