Do you need to worry about catching monkeypox? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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Even as Covid continues apace, monkeypox has emerged and is spreading around the world. Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security senior scholar Amesh Adalja says transmission to you is only likely under specific circumstances, for a virus that usually spreads from animals to people.

Amesh Adalja: That close person to person contact is a mechanism for this virus to get into people, and it can also involve things like linens, or clothing that might have been worn by somebody that had monkeypox and had monkeypox lesions. That’s primarily what we’ve seen, and eventually that three-quarters being related to animals is now probably three-quarters related to person to person spread. One of the things that comes up is also respiratory spread. Theoretically there have been demonstrations of respiratory spread of this virus when people are in close contact with each other but sometimes its very hard to separate what’s from close skin to skin contact versus what’s from a respiratory droplet going from one person to another.  :34

Adalja notes that it is clear that abundant respiratory spread is not taking place with monkeypox. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.