epidemiology

Two months into the international monkeypox epidemic, which so far has caused almost 6,000 infections in the United States and more than 18,000 cases worldwide, it may be old news to say that this disease has visited the US before. In 2003, the virus arrived via exotic pets imported from Ghana, sickening 72 people, including kids as young as 3 years old. It sent 19 people to the hospital before the outbreak burned itself out.Looking back, the obvious lesson seems to be how much monkeypox has changed its behavior since…

Ring vaccination worked for smallpox because a person-to-person pattern of spread makes it possible to predict and interrupt chains of transmission. The process is straightforward: Find the people most at risk of infection, give them shots. But to take those actions today to curb monkeypox, you have to find cases, you have to identify their likely contacts—and, crucially, you have to have vaccines to distribute. So far, in the US, none of those efforts are going well, and epidemiologists, scientists, and experts in LGBTQ…

As we continue to face episodic COVID surges globally, the U.S. government and its Centers for Disease Control need to focus on enhancing our systems for detecting the next highly infectious variant before we are caught unprepared once more. To do this, our government needs to invest in technology and fix current systemic inefficiencies to rapidly sequence the genetic information of COVID variants so that doctors and public health officials are better able to inform the public and strategize accordingly for implementing…

The recent Supreme Court decision in the case known as West Virginia v. EPA weakened the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate carbon emissions from power plants. At the heart of this ruling is the capacity of the U.S. federal government to regulate the release of substances that can be harmful to American people. The EPA had been using the Clean Air Act to assist utilities and power companies in the transition from fossil fuel–based electricity generation to less carbon-intensive sources, such as wind or…

3D illustration of monkeypox virusIllustration: Kateryna Kon (Shutterstock)The New York City Health Department will begin offering the monkeypox vaccine preemptively to men who have sex with men and have had multiple recent partners. Appointments are available as soon as Friday.The agency made the announcement two days before Pride festivities kick off in the city. It had already been collaborating with NYC Health and Hospitals in offering the vaccine to those who were close contacts with someone suspected or confirmed to…

Thank you to everyone who wrote in last month to confirm that, indeed, only journalists care what happens to Twitter. As Elon Musk’s bizarre dance between buying the company and trash-talking it into oblivion continues, it’s a healthy reminder for us not to get too obsessed—though now that he may be getting access to the complete fire hose of Twitter users’ data, you might worry about what he’s going to do with it. Here’s the update.We Do Know How to Beat a Pandemic—Some of Us, AnywayIt’s Pride month in the US, and so it…

When monkeypox briefly found its way into the US in 2003, it infected prairie dogs. “We know that ground squirrels are highly susceptible to the virus and that there is a wide host range of species,” says Rimoin. “If monkeypox were able to become established in a wildlife reservoir outside of Africa, it would be a very complicated situation to navigate.”To pinpoint exactly how widespread the current outbreak is, the UK has chosen to make monkeypox a notifiable disease, meaning all health professionals and laboratories…

If you’re unfortunate enough to have had an intimate encounter with the dreaded Sars-CoV-2 virus, I’m afraid your dalliance with it might not have been your last. Get ready for round two (and three, and maybe four—maybe ad infinitum). Welcome to the Great Reinfection.In the early months of the pandemic, reinfections were a remarkable rarity, even making global news when discovered. “When the pandemic first started, everybody assumed that once you got it, you were done,” says Juliet Pulliam, director of the South African…

While the current monkeypox outbreak will be the first time many have heard of the disease, the virus is thought to have been infecting people for centuries, possibly even millennia. A member of the same virus family as chickenpox and smallpox, monkeypox’s first documented cases were back in 1958, when there were two outbreaks in colonies of lab monkeys being kept for research—hence the name.This, though, is a bit of a misnomer. The virus is usually carried by rodents such as squirrels, pouched rats, and dormice, among…

When Moritz Kraemer first heard about the new monkeypox outbreak spreading through the UK, Europe, and the US, it was not through conventional scientific channels, or from the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), but via Twitter. As each suspected case was reported, and infectious disease experts shared their theories in real time, Kraemer—an epidemiologist at the University of Oxford who specializes in modeling the spread of infectious diseases—became increasingly concerned.“We realized that this outbreak was unusual in…