What a drag. Next time I dismiss a peon with a haughty “A pox on thee and thy descendents!”, he’s going to come back at me with “What variety of pox, if I may ask for the particulars.”
It really ruins the effect.
EVERYBODY DUCK! HE’S FLINGING FECES!!
Band name alert!
Too late! Had it a couple years ago. At least, I assume I did, since I had flu-like symptoms around the same time as the first dead crows were found across the street. The Lombard/Villa Park, Illinois area is never dull, what with weird diseases and the former home of the Unabomber. Correction, it’s ALWAYS dull, but it has wacky diseases and the Unabomber.
If it’s weaker than smallpox, shouldn’t this ailment be called tinypox? Or micropox?
I though it was like chicken pox on the underarms, so that you were constantly scratching yourself there. Try it without crossing your arms. 
Wow. They were an animal lovin’ family for sure. 13 cats. 20 dogs. 7 horses. 4 goats. 3 donkeys. 1 recovering prairie dog and the dead one.
2 MB pdf file from the CDC. It’s a slide show with a day by day description of the outbreak. The page with the links.
Actually those links are from the Marshfield Clinic, in Marshfield, Wisconsin which was linked to by the CDC.
Renaming Monkeypox
Evidently it has been proposed that the disease be renamed to escape stereotyping and stigma asociating the disease with Africa:
A word of advice – although changing the name to hMPXV might make it easier to remember than some random jumble to letters, when I look at that my license-plate-trained unscrambling mind immediately thinks h MonkeyPoX Virus. Why not give it a pronounceable name instead of something that looks like an acronym?
Call it King Kong Virus (that’s better than a mere monkey any day – and it has nothing to do with Africa) or Jurassic Sickness (so it has nothing to do with the Jurassic era? Neither does a park full of Cretaceous dinosaurs) or The Klingon Flu . Or use those naming algorithms they use to make up names for cars and prescription medicines and call it something like Belfort or Klerbmin or Xerlang.
I miss when diseases had poetic and pronounceable names like Syphilis (which was named after a shepherd in a 1530 poem, supposedly the first sufferer of the disease)
Monkeypox shows up every so often in the US. The reason it’s making such a bigass deal now is because we’re still in pandemic-panic-mode.
The usual way monkeypox first appears in America is because of smugglers from Africa selling cute little critters to exotic animal collectors. Then it shows up in prairie dogs for the same reason: people think, oh how CUTE!
Perhaps the exotic animal collector has both prairie dogs and the African cute-cuddle in the same collection. The collector himself could pass the pox from one species to another.
Anyway, previous outbreaks in the US have always died out. And I’m sure the collectors get busted and people are admonished to leave the cute cuddly exotics ALONE.
CDC has discovered that smallpox vaccinations will prevent monkeypox. If people continue to collect exotic animals, smugglers will continue to take them from their native habitats, and monkey pox will spread. We may once again add a smallpox vaccination to our list of pokes and jabs we regularly receive to stay healthy.
Watch the NatGeo channels, the Discovery channels, the BBC specials. Get your fill of “Oh, so CUUUTE!” that way, and leave the exotics ALONE. The big ones can eat you, and the little ones can make you sick.
~VOW
Get a cat or dog, instead.
So it’s spreading among humans because of prairie dogs? Is there a prairie dog trail this can be linked to?
The Li’l wrecker had a pox in highschool.
Weird fever, coming and going. Very red skin with several pox like sores that itched like crazy.
The doctor didn’t want her in the waiting room so they told me to bring her to the back. A nurse escorted us thru a maze of hallways to a treatment room.
The doctor said is wasn’t chicken pox. Duh, she had had the chicken pox vaccine. The redness of her skin alarmed him.
He burst one of the pox marks and put the clear fluid in a vile and took a picture of her back.
And sent us home with stuff she had to soak in, in the tub.
He basically told us to self quarantine, til we knew something else.
It came back as Cow Pox.
Not terribly infectious, but to some sick folks it was. She got 10 days excused from school.
The doctor couldn’t believe it. He said he had never seen it.
I believe Monkey pox is of the same ilk. Are we being too fearful because COVID scared the crap out of everyone.
If it’s really bad infectious I’ll get it. I keep dodging COVID. I hope I’m as lucky with the pox amongst me.
Is it even possible for your average Joe in Anytown, USA to even get a smallpox vaccine nowadays? Boomers got it as a matter of course but nobody my age (41, right on the GenX/Millenial cutoff) has been given the smallpox vaccine that I’m aware of.
IIRC that should protect her against smallpox. Would that mean monkeypox too?
Does your daughter know how she might have gotten it? That’s actually the disease used in some of the old smallpox vaccines.
As far as I know, everyone who joins the military gets smallpox vaccinations along with a whole bunch of other shots. I recently read something about the military jabs being changed to protect against Monkeypox but have no other knowledge.
I feel pretty safe, I got smallpox vaccinations both when I was a child and when I joined the military. I’m pretty sure I can avoid having sex with strangers who have blisters on their hands, so no worries on my part.
Her cousin came from the middle east thru India. He stayed there a few days.
Then came to our house and on to home.
We think he might have been carrying it.
ETA he was a Marine.
Is it still given via a bifurcated needle that leaves a nickle-sized scar on the arm?
Not when I got my second vaccination in 1976. That was back in the days of getting lined up and getting shot with airguns in both arms.
I’m pretty sure the airguns were fazed out a few years later but have no experience with it since then. I do have that scar from my first one, though.
I guess my first defense will be to not have sex with strangers. I’m old, married since forever and have a bad back. Avoiding sex with strangers isn’t going to be much of an issue for me.
My friend’s husband had to get the smallpox vaccine in the military, and they did indeed use the bifurcated needle, or an approximation, to give it, and he has a corresponding scar, and had to be quarantined for a month.
When this thread first started in 2003, the then-current US monkeypox outbreak was indeed traced to prairie dogs. Apparently the natural reservoir of the disease is rodents, but the current worldwide outbreak among humans seems to be traced to human international travel.