Is Monkeypox A Real Problem Or Just Clickbait?

this video is supported by brilliant [Music] epoxypany the u.s is considering whether to declare monkeypox a public health emergency public health emergency declaration for pox for example from monkey pots five deaths due to monkey pox kyle plank is recovering from monkey pox you have monkey pox now might be monkey pox monkey parks monkey pox monkey folks monkey pox that's right everyone covet 19 is so last season and the new hotness on the plague scene is monkey pox so do you want to be on trend with the latest and greatest disease outbreak in town then stick around because we've got the ins and outs on really really we got a new pandemic really [Music] well we had a good run there were a few weeks there where it looked like kovit was finally starting to wane or at least become manageable things started to feel kind of normal again i remember normal but no we can't have that can we not only other new variants covet cases are on the rise again but now we got a whole new pandemic or do we yeah monkey pox has been all over the news lately but i mean is it actually a concern or is it just the thing that the news stations are using now to get you to stick around on the next commercial break cynicism aside monkey pox is a thing and it has been popping up all over the place lately so why don't we take a look at this real quick see if we can get to the bottom of it okay so as of this recording it's important for me to say that because this is changing all the time there are around 15 300 cases of monkey pox around the world now that doesn't sound like a lot after what we've just been through with kovid but there are a few things to keep in mind here first of all that number's rising quickly to give you an idea of how quickly when my writer ryan was researching this video his script said 5 300 cases so it's now three times higher than it was when he submitted this script to me just a couple weeks ago and it's probably up quite a bit right now as you see this by the time i get this out so i'll put a link down below in the description you can click and see exactly where things are right now the other thing that's notable is this map here you can see the most cases are in the us and europe but you see these little blue dots down here in africa that's where monkey pox has historically been seen all this orange that's never really happened before in fact out of the 71 countries with monkey pox right now 65 of them have never seen cases before ever so yeah this is a thing now as for what's happening in the u.s again at the time that we're recording this new york has the most cases at 581 followed by california at 365 and then illinois florida basically the urban centers of the u.s the total number in the u.s is 2 323 but keep in mind that's up from 19 cases at the beginning of june and yeah i think it's pretty safe to say that we're all pretty shell shocked from covet 19 because we all do remember a time when it was like oh there's just a few cases over in washington and then suddenly there were thousands of them and then you know yeah here we are now i mentioned earlier those countries in africa where monkey pox is normally found um the democratic republic of congo has by far the most cases with 1 356 uh reported between january 1st and may 22nd anyway uh monkey pox has killed more than 70 people in africa this year according to the sources that we found now the fact that it has been historically seen in africa and it's called monkey pox you probably put two and two together and figured out that it got its name because there are monkeys in africa and the virus jumped from monkeys to humans there um you would be wrong yeah it actually came from denmark it was first seen in monkeys kept at denmark's statins serum institute in 1958 and it was first seen in humans 12 years later monkey pox is a type of ortho pox virus this is the same type of virus that includes cow pox camel pox and skunk pox didn't know that skunk pox was a thing did you it doesn't include chickenpox though that's a that's a different type of virus but it does include yikes smallpox and the symptoms are similar to that of smallpox actually including fever exhaustion headaches swollen lymph nodes and rashes of bumps that look like blisters or pimples thankfully what they don't share is the mortality rate before it was eradicated smallpox at a mortality rate of around 30 monkey pox has a 1 to 10 mortality rate why one to ten percent uh because just like coronavirus there are different variants there's a variant from central africa that's pretty severe the one from west africa is less so and it's actually the milder version that's making its way around the world right now so that's a good thing that means that monkey pox will probably not become as deadly as covid19 unless of course it mutates monkeypox or mpv uses dna to encode its genes and that's a good thing because dna is more stable and less prone to you know mutations than rna viruses like say influenza or cobit 19. but npv has mutated in the past and not for the better the deadly version that i was talking about earlier that deadly variation yeah that was a mutation of the milder version and the more virus spreads the more chance it has to mutate in fact a recent study looked at this virus that's going around this particular variant said that it has experienced accelerated evolution yeah they studied samples collected in 2022 and then compared them to samples from 2018 and 2019 and they found about 50 dna changes that's at least six times the number of mutations the researchers were expecting now these mutations don't seem to have made monkey pox deadlier which is a good thing but they have made it more transmissible it was actually 2003 when we saw monkey pox break out in the first time in the u.s and it was traced to pet prairie dogs because apparently that's a thing pet prairie dogs that were housed next to a pet exotic african rodent sanctuary which is where the prairie dogs got it from then they bit their owners and they gave it to their owners just a lot of bad decisions there you know i used to think that exotic pets were really cool i like the idea of having some kind of pet that most people wouldn't have i thought that would make me cool and everything i'm not such a big fan anymore it just seems like a lot of these pandemics and outbreaks seem to be zoonotic viruses that jump from animals to humans and it's usually exotic animals of some kind that are sort of the crux of it all i don't know it just seems like a vector that seems to trigger a lot of other vectors if that makes any sense so i mean i get it prairie dogs are cute and all but i mean no just just just know in fact one of the fears about monkey pox being a zoonotic virus is that it can become a cycle of zoonotic transmission like we got it from prairie dogs maybe it could jump to our cats and then bounce back to us and each time just mutating a little bit more actually one interesting thing about this outbreak is that as opposed to in africa cases were more common in rural areas there amongst hunters and whatnot but in this outbreak you see it mostly in urban areas and that's because although it is not a sexually transmitted disease it has been spread mostly through [Music] knocking the boots and this is actually where things get a little bit prickly because it has been prevalent in gay communities which of course has led some people to use that to smear lgbt people which outside of being gross and horrible is also dangerous because people don't generally get tested or treated for stigmatized diseases which only serves to spread it further needs to be said again just because it's being spread by sexual contact does not make it a sexually transmitted disease and yet being called a gay disease does bring up some parallels to the aids crisis in the 80s yeah we're stigmatizing and moralizing around it led to it not being taken seriously and then that let it take a foothold that it otherwise you know might not have had now it needs to be said monkey pox is not hiv not even close okay but the best way to keep it that way is to prevent it from spreading and mutating one of the best ways to do that as we have seen recently is with a vaccine and we do have one there's a company called bavarian nordic that makes it it's been approved for monkey pox but there's only like a million doses that have ever been made like ever now apparently people have tested using smallpox vaccinations because they're similar types of viruses and they've been effective but it can also be dangerous for people with compromised immune systems so is monkey pox the next covid that's the big question and the answer is not likely at least not in its current state but that doesn't mean that it's harmless maybe the bigger question is is this just our future are we just gonna be doomed to bounce from one pandemic to another will we ever be able to shake somebody's hand again without a creepy crawly feeling look the fact is we evolved as isolated tribes of people who are now attempting to be a global species and while there's a lot of good that comes from our cultures mixing together and whatnot the downside is that yeah our our bugs get around in the past this could lead to entire civilizations being wiped out as we saw to the indigenous native americans now our cultures are constantly mixing and colliding all the time and if the grand story of humans is that we started as fragmented and isolated tribes it eventually became a global species we're in that weird kind of awkward pre-teen years you know the years when we've haven't fully stirred but we did just get thrown in the pot we've mixed enough to share all of our bugs but not enough to become immune to them throw on top of that the encroaching of our habitats into nature and the potential for a zoonotic virus to spill over just goes through the roof as well maybe we eventually become immune to all of them or maybe new ones never stop coming and we'll always be fighting something off that's probably a lot more likely you might say the real story of the world is one of just countless cells constantly vying for supremacy we're just the only clumps of cells that are aware enough to know what's going on maybe that's the way it's always been maybe that's the way it always will be just whack them all forever luckily most of them like monkey pox are survivable so maybe we should consider ourselves lucky so is monkeypox something to be concerned about or is it just overhyped clickbait it's a little both of course media companies are going to hype this to the clickiest level to get as many eyeballs as possible of course this is going to be pandemic porn of course i use a click bait title on this video and of course we're all way more on edge about outbreaks of disease than we used to be after what we've been through or the opposite maybe crisis fatigue sets in and we just stop even paying attention to it the best thing you can do right now is just be aware of the outbreak and take basic precautions monkey pox is only transmissible through close skin to skin contact so you don't have to worry about breathing it in so that's a good thing the cdc recommends avoiding close skin and skin contact with anybody that might have a rash that looks like blisters or bumps don't eat after or use utensils after somebody who has monkey pox or look like they might have monkey pox don't handle clothes or bedding used by anybody with monkey pox and of course to wash your hands with soap and sanitizer if you come into contact with anybody with monkey pox and if you do have monkey pox obviously they want you to isolate yourself until quote all lesions have resolved the scabs have fallen off and a fresh layer of intact skin has formed so if you're scabby stay inside and if you meet somebody who's scabby knock boots of someone else basically when it all comes down to it some awareness and basic prevention is all that's really required here but you know we we can't freak out over every outbreak that happens because well there's going to be a lot more of these but if you are isolating or are too freaked out to leave your house hey might be a good time to learn some new stuff with today's sponsor brilliant i like brilliant because it uses visual and interactive lessons to teach you by solving problems which is something that we all kind of know how to do on an innate level like if you've always struggled with learning it's probably because the old-school way of sort of rote memorization thing which we were all taught in school frankly it doesn't work for everyone maybe it didn't work for you but brilliant kind of hacks this innate problem-solving ability we all have and then uses it to teach scientific concepts in a way that makes sense to you and then you can use that as a foundation that you can build off of one of my favorites to start with is the physics of the everyday 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forming an awesome community and just being overall remarkable people i've got some new people i need to shout out roko we got some new members that have joined we got megan evans leader mir slavislav crystal matlock linen sarah matcha carmelo quijano uh cornelia winstrom raw dogging reality with rocky uh steve kershaw james kennedy jurgen shimmer marshall klein lt marshall john w carlos rodriguez dimitri moore dr through uh nicholas steinbern bauer nicholas steinbauer uh ben krakalkas nibrius in moon calico 10 in lethem keane uh i'm really backed up because i took some time off for a vacation recently but thank you guys so much if you would like to join them and become a channel member you can get early access to live streams or access to live streams early access to videos and get a little thing next to your name down in the comments make you stand out a little bit just hit the little join button down below please do like and share this video if you liked it and if this is your first time here maybe check out this video it's an interview i did with a guy named david kwamen at the beginning of the kobit 19 pandemic he wrote a book called spill over and we talked about zoonotic viruses and how they spill over and stuff so it's a little bit more in-depth on kind of some of the stuff i was talking about here so you can go check that out or look at any of the videos down here that might have my face on them and if you like them i do invite you to subscribe come back with videos every monday all right that's it for now you guys go out there have an eye opening rest of the week stay safe and i'll see you next monday love you guys take care

Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 476,352

Keywords: answers with joe, joe scott

Id: 8poCg9fOqYc

Length: 13min 32sec (812 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 01 2022