By Tom Avril; Philadelphia Inquirer
Monkeypox — the oddly named infectious rash that was unfamiliar to most Americans until last month — continues to spread very slowly in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and most of the United States.
As far as anyone knows, that is.
Infectious-disease experts say the official CDC total — 156 cases as of Wednesday afternoon, including two in Philadelphia and one in New Jersey — is almost certainly an undercount.
The reasons behind that statement require a bit of explanation, but the end result is a push for expanded testing to identify any cases that may have been missed.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services started shipping test kits to five commercial laboratory companies this week, boosting capacity by thousands of tests per week, the agency said Wednesday. And others have called for allowing academic medical centers to conduct tests, as they did in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when capacity shortages at state labs meant some patients waited up to a week for their results.
A failure to test more people for monkeypox will hamper efforts to keep the emerging threat under control, said epidemiologist Michael LeVasseur, an assistant professor at Drexel University’s Dornsife School of Public Health.
“When it comes to our public health response, it is the exact same as March 2020,” he said. “We are in an emergency.”
The good news: The variety of monkeypox circulating in the United States causes mild to moderate disease, and no one here has died. Still, the telltale skin lesions are often painful, and they can result in lasting scars.
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