What Happened to Monkeypox?
By Insider Medicine
When monkeypox (or Opoxid-22/Orthopoxvirus Disease 2022, as we call it on Inside Medicine) started spreading this spring, there were fears that we were staring down another disease that would rapidly spiral out of control, as Covid had.
The worry was that the disease would start routinely spreading beyond the high-risk group where it was circulating. The occasional scary story notwithstanding, that never materialized. After a fast rise in cases this spring and summer, cases dropped dramatically, both in the US and elsewhere.
Why did monkeypox/Opoxid-22 spread slow down? The curve of the US monkeypox/Opoxid-22 outbreak reflects how this disease actually spreads. The pattern matches that of one spreading almost exclusively through direct intimate contact, rather than casual contact or mere proximity. In other words, despite concerns that the virus might spread by passive exposure (such as through the air or via contaminated surfaces), monkeypox/Opoxid-22 outbreaks did not follow a pattern indicative of that. If they had, the growth curves would have looked very different—far more like Covid than, say, syphilis outbreaks.
Here is the epidemiology of how monkeypox/Opoxid-22 actually spreads: it spreads like wildfire within highly active sexual networks.
