Monkeypox is here, but let's not go blaming people

You may remember when Covid-19 entered New Zealand's shores in early 2020. Panic filled the country and with that panic blame was placed on various communities across the motū. With Monkeypox now in New Zealand, experts warn kiwi’s to not have the same overreaction.

This comes after the head of the World Health Organisation declared the Monkeypox outbreak an international public health emergency.

University of Auckland Associate Professor and vaccine expert Dr Helen Petousis-Harris explained that the WHO's emergency setting was a call to action rather than an indication that we should all panic.

"This isn't a disease like Covid in that it's not super infectious," she says.

Monkeypox is spread through close contact with someone who has been infected with the virus.

"You can get monkeypox from sleeping in the same linen as somebody, by wearing their clothes and certainly from hugging and kissing."

While the virus has spread rapidly across the gay community in Europe and the United States, Petousis-Harris says transmission isn't contingent on sexual orientation.

"It's a very democratic virus, it will infect anybody," she says.

"This is something we need to be aware of and we also need to be wary of not stigmatising communities about this because it won't help in controlling this."

Petousis-Harris says that one of the biggest local risks in the local context is that the virus is used as a weapon in prejudiced narratives – which also became apparent during the early stages of the Covid-19 outbreak.

"With Covid, we saw the stigmatisation of people of Asian origin at the beginning," she says.

"We also see this play out with other emerging infectious diseases that affect people who are poor. You often have people saying: 'Ah, it's just because of hygiene or whatever…. It's not a real danger'."

Petousis-Harris says prejudiced narratives could lead to vulnerable groups being targeted while also contributing to others not taking the virus seriously enough.

The good news is that the smallpox vaccine has proven effective against monkeypox – and we have a global stockpile of the vaccine around the world.

"The reason there are stockpiles of smallpox vaccines is because smallpox has remained a bioterrorism threat, so maintaining research on the vaccine and therapeutic anti-virals has been ongoing all of this time, even though the disease was eradicated by 1980," she says.

"There are not only stockpiles that have been maintained for decades but also new vaccines."

In recent weeks, the Ministry of Health said it was still acquiring doses of the smallpox vaccine to protect the local community against the virus.

The variant of monkeypox spreading around the world has a much lower mortality rate than other variants that could kill as many as 10 per cent of those infected.

For this reason, Petousis-Harris is confident that the country should be able to handle the outbreak if the number of cases does escalate further.

"We know how it's transmitted, we know how to prevent it, and we have treatments. We just have to work with communities to make sure that it's not stigmatised."