It probably isn’t a great idea to be too complacent about the next public health “threats,” monkeypox and fungi

 

Megadroughts, megafloods, megamainstreammediahypocrisy, megapoliticaldelusion, megawhatever. At least the Seattle Times has time for a “human” story, giving a security guard his 15-minutes of fame on the front page the other day, bewailing his “loneliness” working in a near empty office building in Pioneer Square. Of course he has to justify to a naïve reporter why he’s getting paid for doing as little as possible, but I suspect that the hardest part of his job is trying to get the day over as quickly as possible—walking around a bit to stay “focused,”  “surf” his cell phone, avoid stressful situations (like shooing away vagrants), or not be caught taking a nap in a secret hideaway. Not everyone in the job is focused on doing as little as possible, but a lot of people get into that occupation because “anyone” is qualified to stand or sit around all day, or least that is their perspective as an "observer."

Anyways, back to the megawhatevers, we have just gone through one pandemic that might not quite be finished with it wicked ways, with strains more communicable but supposedly less deadly, but not taken with any particular concern even though we are told that in the past month in this country there has been an average of 40,000 cases a day of new COVID cases (but likely many more, since people who “home test” don’t always report positive results) and 400 deaths. Outside of Japan and South Korea, who have been reporting 400,000 new cases between them a day for a month now, one suspects that many countries have simply felt no reason to continue to report any numbers (i.e. India and China), that can be called “accurate.”

But COVID isn’t the only health scare on the horizon. Much has been made of the threat not just of monkeypox, but the potential for the spread of deadly fungal infections. C. auris and Aspergillus, for example, have been allowed a toe-hold thanks to COVID, according to a story last year in Scientific American—and the health care system is as ill-equipped to counter it as it is the monkeypox issue, as it was before initially with the coronavirus pandemic.

While monkeypox has been talked about in the media, and John Oliver has discussed it in a recent episode, it isn’t exactly on the public conscience as anything of particular concern. Should it be? Who knows at this point; one thing we know is that a certain someone back in March 2020 told the country that COVID was no big deal, and would be over soon. For now, we have been told that it is similar to the smallpox virus, doesn’t spread “easily” from person-to-person, isn’t particularly deadly, has nothing to do with monkeys, and causes rashes and ugly-looking sores and scabs, the phases provided here by the Cleveland Clinic:

 

Oliver’s piece mentions that 20 years ago there was a brief “scare” when prairie dogs were blamed for an outbreak of monkeypox when they are sold as “exotic pets,” that it is spread by “sustained” contact between infected human flesh, and that most of the current cases have been among gay and bisexual people, which of course leads to people like Marjorie Taylor Greene to wave off the health threat as a “cultural” problem, which was of course the attitude toward the AIDS epidemic.

That “threat” from 20 years ago, which the Bush administration tried to tie to biological warfare threats following 9-11, led to the creation of a stockpile of 20 million doses of a vaccine against both smallpox and monkeypox. According to a New York Times story earlier this month, that stock was kept in freezers for years unused, and by the time the current breakout occurred in May, nearly all of it had long since exceeded their expiration dates, with only enough useable doses to administer to 1,200 people. The CDC lists more than 13,500 cases currently, nearly quadruple the number just three weeks ago.

In regard to the threat of a fungi “epidemic,” the issue seems to be that people with reduced immunity caused by the COVID virus are more susceptible to the negative effects of fungi that they are exposed to on a daily basis, such as Aspergillus. According to a National Geographic story, there was a “perfect storm” in India between COVID and fungi infections that led to death, with the Indian medical establishment—probably under pressure from the government—preferring to label COVID deaths by some other means (such as fungi infections), even though COVID was the principle reason why many people became more susceptible to other diseases they otherwise could have survived because of their compromised immune systems.

While fungi appears to be more dangerous to plants than people, the NG warns that like MRSA which typically is “harmless” until it gets inside a person’s body, “Rampaging fungi excrete toxins that destroy tissue, which they can then feed on—similar to the way they decompose organic matter as part of an ecosystem’s nutrient cycle. Like bacteria, fungi can cause organs to shut down through sepsis, an overreaction of the immune system to microbial attacks. Or they can form fungal balls that push aside organs. Resistance just makes things worse: mortality rates are 25 percent higher when an antifungal-resistant pathogen is involved.”

As with MRSA which is untreatable by antibiotics, there is no “cure” for monkeypox and fungi infections (or for COVID, for that matter), just treatment to keep them from getting worse so that they go away on their own. What seems to concern medical professionals at the moment is not necessarily that monkeypox and fungi infections can’t be controlled, but that there doesn’t seem to be much public urgency in considering it a “problem” until it gets out of control. Nobody wants to deal with lockdowns anymore, but the fear is that such complacency is the key ingredient to future problems. I may not know what the future holds, but in the meantime I stubbornly continue to wear a mask in public.