Monkeypox: Tests ease fears
2003-06-17 10:41
Madison - Preliminary lab tests indicate that two people who fell sick after being exposed to patients infected with the monkeypox virus have not contracted the illness, public health officials said on Monday.
The results from a round of preliminary blood tests on the two medical workers came back negative for the disease at the weekend, easing fears that the potentially deadly virus was being spread by human-to-human transmission.
Officials at the Wisconsin department of health and human services said they are waiting on a readout of secondary blood tests for final confirmation.
"Infectious diseases are often diagnosed using two separate blood tests taken several weeks apart," explained Herb Bostrom, the department's chief of communicable diseases.
"At this time, we only have results on the first blood sample, and are awaiting the results of the additional tests."
But the weekend test results from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, make "it even less likely that these health care workers are infected", he added.
About 82 people in eight states are thought to have been infected by the virus in this outbreak of monkeypox - the first such outbreak in the Western Hemisphere.
Public health officials believe the outbreak spread to humans through prairie dogs, exotic pets that probably contracted the virus from a sick African rat.
When a nurse, and a medical worker and her boyfriend developed some of the symptoms characteristic of the illness after the two medical workers treated two monkeypox patients, Wisconsin officials feared the worst.
Monkeypox has had a 10% mortality rate in Africa, but there have been no fatalities to date in the United States.