More than half of monkeypox cases in the current outbreak may have been passed to others before symptoms appeared, according to a new modelling study from the United Kingdom.
But that's not what epidemiologists found when they investigated contact tracing records from the current monkeypox outbreak in the U.K. As in the U.S., about 95 per cent of recent monkeypox cases in the U.K. have been among men who have sex with other men. Most cases have been reported after close sexual contact.
Overall, after researchers adjusted their data to account for possible sources of bias, they found the median serial interval between cases and contacts in the study was shorter than the median incubation period for infections, "which indicates considerably greater pre-symptomatic transmission than previously thought," the study authors write.
"I think that it should change the messaging," said Hanage. "I think that the messaging should be that if you were worried about monkeypox, you cannot assume that your partner is not infectious just because they don't have symptoms." Since vaccine doses have become more plentiful, both the U.S. and U.K. have switched to vaccinating people at high risk for catching the infection, which was the right strategy to curtail asymptomatic spread, Swartzberg said.
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