Docs Urge Calm as Right-Wingers Lie About Kids and Monkeypox - The Daily Beast

“The European countries that have reported pediatric cases have reported one or two cases, and so the virus isn’t spreading among kids,” said Dr.

Epidemiologists, infectious disease specialists and public health authorities are in near-universal agreement that the current outbreak appears to pose low risk to kids at the moment.

“The European countries that have reported pediatric cases have reported one or two cases, and so the virus isn’t spreading among kids,” said Dr.

The current outbreak, Karan said, has forced public health officials to unlearn decades of knowledge about the virus, among them the previous bias that monkeypox was largely limited to children.

“Kids will have close contact—they’ll be touching a lot of surfaces, they won’t be washing and cleaning their hands, they have a lot of exposure to fomites—whereas adults are probably more diligent about what they touch, what they put in their mouth, what’s on their hands, how often they wash their hands, that kind of thing,” Karan said, explaining the thinking behind a five-year study in the 1980s that found that nine in ten cases of the virus occurred in children younger than fifteen.

But recent reevaluations of that and similar surveys, infectious disease experts told The Daily Beast, indicate that those pediatric cases may not have actually proved a unique monkeypox risk to kids at all.

“It is true that in countries where the virus was endemic, cases occurred in young children, and we know that kids under eight were at higher risk for severe disease.

“There’s something we’re still not fully picking up or understanding about this outbreak,” said Karan, who noted that while most orthopox viruses, the family of viruses that includes smallpox and monkeypox, spread more easily amongst children than adults, the current outbreak isn’t demonstrating that same trait