MONKEY POX! MORE HYSTERIA

 

POOR SCIENCE EDUCATION & THE WILLINGNESS TO EMBRACE 
DISINFORMATION, CONSPIRACY THEORIES & OUTLANDISH 
NONSENSE DOES NOT BODE WELL FOR A NATION! 

"R" VOTERS ARE MOST LIKELY TO FALL PREY TO NONSENSE 
& THE LEAST LIKELY TO RESEARCH IN ORDER TO INFORM 
THEMSELVES.


MAY 24, 2022

Today's US coronavirus / COVID-19 numbers in the US
From the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University

Confirmed US cases: 83,466,691
Confirmed US deaths: 1,002,542

Since my last newsletter on Friday, 936 Americans have died of COVID-19. And 405,710 Americans became infected (that we know of).

So Massachusetts has the first confirmed case of monkeypox in the US this year. Lucky us. The guy who is infected had traveled to Canada and is being treated in isolation at Mass. General.

The virus is common in Central and West Africa, but outside of that area, there recently have been cases confirmed in the United Kingdom, Portugal, and Spain. The World Health Organization says there are more than 100 suspected and confirmed cases in Europe and North America.

Here's the Globe's rundown of what you should know:

-- Monkeypox is in the same family as smallpox, which was eradicated by vaccines in 1980. (Hear that, COVID vaccine refuseniks? Eradicated by vaccines.) However, it's a less serious illness than smallpox.

-- Symptoms are flu-like, but you also get lesions/scabs similar to smallpox as well as swollen lymph nodes.

-- Infections generally last two to four weeks.

-- In Central and West Africa, people get infected from bites or scratches from rodents and small mammals, preparing wild game, or having contact with an infected animal or possibly animal products, according to public health officials.

(For some reason, hearing about infectious small mammals caused an image of Marjorie Taylor Greene to pop into my head.)

It's not easy to catch from infected people, but you can get it through contact with bodily fluids, monkeypox sores, respiratory droplets through face-to-face contact, or contaminated items like bed sheets or clothes. However, household disinfectants can kill the monkeypox virus. (Just don't swallow them.)

-- This isn't the first time that monkeypox has shown up in the US; Texas and Maryland each had one case last year. It's also relatively new in Nigeria, where it had disappeared for 40 years before reemerging in 2017. Since then, more than 450 cases have been reported there.

There also was a fairly large breakout in the US back in 2003 when health officials found 47 confirmed and probable cases in six states, traced to the importation of small mammals from Ghana. (MTG was born in Georgia, not Ghana.)