After more than two years of “Covid-19” dominated news about viruses and ways to prevent them, the focus is now on monkeypox, which has spread in recent days in non-African countries, which is unusual.
Monkeypox is a mild contagious disease that is endemic in western and central Africa. And infection with the disease in its infancy was caused by contact with an infected animal, but now it is transmitted from one person to another.
The disease spread to a number of non-African countries, such as Spain, Greece, the United States and Canada, and reached the Middle East, with Israel recording the first infection in the region..
This disease spreads through direct contact, such as touching an infected person’s clothes or saliva, and sexual contact is one of the main causes of infection.
With the spread of news related to the virus and the symptoms it causes, concern increased about its severity, and the possibility of countries returning to the closure scenarios that occurred to confront Corona, but the most prominent question remains, “Can people recovering from smallpox be infected with monkeypox?”, especially since smallpox is one of the Diseases that most people contract in childhood, and there is already an effective vaccine against it.
To answer the question, Professor and Consultant of Clinical Pharmacotherapy for Infectious Diseases, Dirar Balawi, emphasized that “all those who received the human pox vaccine, which was declared eradicated in 1980, or who were infected with the human pox virus, are immune to monkeypox.”
In an interview with “Sky News Arabia,” he said: “We expect, at least in theory, that they will be immune to at least 85 percent, against infection with other viruses of the smallpox family, such as monkeypox.”
He added, “Scientifically, the genomic similarity between human pox and monkeypox is 96.3 percent, and this is a very large percentage, so people who have been infected or vaccinated with human pox vaccine form memory cells and T cells that remain in their bodies in case they are infected again.”
And Balawi continued: “Here, some people may question the possibility of these bodies dropping, and the answer is yes, so our recommendations now in the event there is an outbreak in a particular place, is that people exposed to infection, such as health care workers or those who care for patients, accept the Get a booster dose of the human pox vaccine.
