The American newspaper, The New York Times, said, in a report on Tuesday, June 7, 2022, that it was among these guidelines set by the Centers for Disease Control: “Put a muzzle, because putting the muzzle contributes to protecting you from many diseases, including monkeypox.” It will be deleted on Monday evening, June 6th.
On Tuesday, June 7, the center said: “We removed the mask instruction from the travel health notice for monkeypox, because it caused confusion.”
However, the center advised “home contacts and health care workers in countries where monkeypox is common to wear masks.”
This guidance also applies to “other persons who have had contact with a person who has been confirmed to have monkeypox”.
This change points to an under-discussed aspect of the current smallpox outbreak, which is that the virus may be airborne, at least over short distances.
Experts said in interviews that although airborne transmission is only a limited factor in its overall spread, there are no confirmed estimates of its contribution.
Scientists claim that monkeypox behaves very similarly to ordinary smallpox. Dr. Donald Melton, a virologist at the University of Maryland, spoke in a 2012 review of several cases of airborne transmission.
He wrote that it was the only plausible explanation during a smallpox outbreak in 1947 in New York, when one patient infected another another seven floors away in the hospital, and in 1970, when a patient infected several other people on three floors of a hospital in Mescheid, Germany, with the help of currents. aerodynamic in the building.
Scientists who were studying an outbreak of smallpox in 2017 in Nigeria also observed infections in a prison, and reported cases of health care workers who had not been in direct contact with patients.
At a scientific conference organized by the World Health Organization last week, many researchers discussed many unknowns about monkeypox, such as the main way it is transmitted.
“The true or dominant pathway of transmission is very mysterious, and can be studied in some animal models. It may require some laboratory research,” Nancy Sullivan, a researcher at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said at the conference.
However, in press briefings and in front of the general public, health officials did not explicitly address the possibility of airborne transmission or the use of masks to protect against it.
In interviews, they also emphasized the role of large amounts of droplets from the respiratory tract of infected patients that settle on objects or people.
Andrea McCollum, the lead virus expert at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, says that having monkeypox requires “close and prolonged contact.”