Friday 20 May 2022 03:43 PM FDA approves smallpox drug also believed to be able to treat monkeypox trends now

The Food and Drug Administration has approved a new drug for monkeypox treatment, as cases of the rare virus has now been detected in 11 countries, including the U.S. and the UK.

SIGA Technologies, based in New York City, announced Friday morning it had received the regulatory green light for an IV formulation of TPOXX, a smallpox drug that was already available in oral form.

The company notes that in Europe, the drug is officially approved as a monkeypox treatment, as many smallpox drugs are because of the similarity of the viruses.

The drug is added to doctors' arsenal as the rare, yet potentially devastating virus continues to spread around the world, having been confirmed or suspected in dozens of cases in eleven countries across Europe and North America.

Those cases include a Massachusetts man who became the first confirmed case of the virus in the U.S. this year on Wednesday. Thursday night, officials in New York City announced they were probing a suspected monkeypox case as well.

TPOXX is now approved for use across Europe, the U.S. and Canada, the three spots where monkeypox has been most active outside of Africa.

SIGA also notes in a statement that President Joe Biden has recently made a budget request to use the drug to treat the emerging virus, meaning it is set to become one of the primary treatments for the virus in the U.S.

There are no specifically formulated drugs available for monkeypox, though physicians will often use smallpox drugs off-label to treat the rare virus.

There is an available vaccine for the virus, though it has little coverage in the United States. 

The virus is common in central and western Africa. Cross-species transmission from Animals to humans is possible through physical contact. An infected person will often suffer rashes and infectious lesions on their skin, along with other flu-like symptoms.

It is mostly found in Nigeria, though there was a 40-year period without a single reported case before it re-emerged in the African nation in 2017.

In typical outbreaks, around one-in-ten cases are fatal, though some experts believe the mortality risk of the strain currently making its way across the world is as low as only one percent.

Cases of the virus sprouted in Europe in recent weeks, with the UK, Portugal and Spain all reporting a combined 20 confirmed or suspected cases last week.

The virus slowly made its way across the European continent, also being detected in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy and Sweden this week. Add the U.S. and Canada, and 11 total nations have confirmed at least one case.

Monkeypox typically spreads through close body contact, Dr Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease expert at Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, Maryland, explained to DailyMail.com.

'It is just in the past it has been more of an animal to human thing… but with close contact it has always been known to spread,' he said.

There was initial speculation that there could be a sexual transmission factor at play during this outbreak, as many people who initially tested positive for the rare virus were gay or bisexual men. Adalja says that it is too early to determine why, but there are a few reasonable explanations.

'It may have just been they were all at a party together and a party where all friends happened to be of a certain sexual orientation,' he explained.

'We don't know whether it was sexual contact, it just needs a touch of the skin of someone.'

He warns that it it likely that more cases of the rare virus in the U.S., though it is unclear whether case figures will eclipse the record 43 cases that were detected in America during a 2003 outbreak.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is warning that men who have sex with other men seem to be most at risk at the moment, as it is traveling through their sexual network, all healthcare providers should be on alert.

'Many of these global reports of monkeypox cases are occurring within sexual networks. However, healthcare providers should be alert to any rash that has features typical of monkeypox,' said Dr Inger Damon, director of CDC’s Division of High-Consequence Pathogens and Pathology, said in a statement released Wednesday night.

'We're asking the public to contact their healthcare provider if they have a new rash and are concerned about monkeypox.'

The CDC also notes that many of the lesions that appear as a result of monkeypox infection may have similarities to symptoms of STIs like syphilis, herpes, HSV, and others. The agency also warns says that even people who are not gay or bisexual men should be on the look out.

The prevalence of cases in the UK, for which nine cases have been confirmed so far, also puts America in particular at an increased risk of of outbreak.

Dr Jennifer McQuiston, a senior official at the CDC, told Stat News that: 'there's a lot of travel between the U.K. and the United States and other global area,' she said.

'So I think our concern is that given that you do have four cases among men who have sex with men, that we probably need to be thinking about messaging to our STI clinics … about what to be on the lookout for, what to be alert for.'

Last year, the U.S. detected a case of the monkeypox in an unnamed Texas man that had recently traveled to Nigeria. A larger probe of 200 people across 27 states also led to the detection of another case in an unnamed person in Maryland.

EVERYTHING you need to know about monkeypox: Strain 'transmits through sex' and is about as deadly as the Wuhan Covid variant — but a vaccine does exist

By: Connor Boyd Health Editor and Emily Craig Health Editor for Mail Online

Monkeypox appears to be spreading globally for the first time in an outbreak that has caught health officials off-guard.

The UK has recorded seven cases of the virus but the majority of them are not linked which suggests more are going undetected.

Spain and Portugal have also spotted the virus for the first time ever and the US is monitoring six people who were on a flight with a positive case.

The majority of patients in the UK are gay or bisexual men, as are the eight Spanish men suspected of having the disease.

Portuguese officials have confirmed five men tested positive and over a dozen more are thought to be infected.

Health chiefs in the UK say the pattern of transmission is 'highly suggestive of spread in sexual networks'.

Until now monkeypox had only been detected in four countries outside of Africa — the UK, US, Israel and Singapore, all of whom had links to Nigeria and Ghana.

Infections are more common in central and western Africa, where they can result from direct contact with infected animals.

Monkeypox can kill up to one in 10 people it infects — but the strain spreading globally is milder and has a fatality rate of about one in 100.

That is roughly the same as the first strain of Covid that came out of Wuhan, however vaccines and natural immunity have since made the coronavirus much weaker.

Monkeypox's similarity

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