Via The Guardian: Monkeypox cases put UK's tropical disease response to the test. Excerpt:
Late on a Friday night Dr Mike Beadsworth left the Royal Liverpool hospital after a “pretty hellish couple of weeks”. The clinical director of tropical and infectious diseases and his team had spent weeks trying to save the life of a Middle Eastern man who had been diagnosed with a deadly virus.
The man had contracted Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (Mers), the first such diagnosis in the UK since 2013.
Beadsworth said his chances of survival were slim. Of the previous four cases, three had died. After weeks of painstaking, meticulous care in the world-renowned tropical diseases unit, however, the man survived.
For Beadsworth, 50, and his team, there would be little respite. He was driving home when he received a phone call. A person in the UK had contracted monkeypox for the first time. The airborne disease was diagnosed in a Nigerian national staying at a naval base in Cornwall.
“We were literally stepping down the unit after looking after the Mers case. This guy had survived and we were really pleased for him,” he said.
“But then I got a call to say we would have to reactivate the network because of a probable monkeypox case in Cornwall. My first thought was: ‘You’ve got to be joking.’ We had just had a pretty hellish couple of weeks and now we had this.”
Following the Ebola crisis of 2014, when the West African epidemic was declared an international emergency, Beadsworth and other health professionals came up with a contingency plan for if a deadly infectious disease were to enter the UK. Now this plan from the High Consequence Infectious Diseases Network – comprising five NHS trusts – was being tested in reality.
Infectious disease experts took part in a teleconference call and plans to contain monkeypox were discussed. “The call lasted around 30 minutes. It was a business call and quick decisions were made,” Beadsworth said. “Although we regard ourselves as specialists in tropical medicine, no one here had seen a case in the UK. There was a lot of rapid literature reading that night.”
The patient was sent to the Royal Free hospital in London, one of five centres in the UK able to care for patients with highly infectious diseases. Beadsworth was relieved. The emergency action plan had worked, the patient had been isolated and the risk had seemingly been contained.
Four days later, however, the “most unimaginable” thing happened. A second, unrelated case of monkeypox was diagnosed in Blackpool. The patient had also just returned to the UK from Nigeria.
“It was fairly unimaginable to have a Mers case, and then it was unimaginable to have one case of monkeypox in Cornwall. Then to have a second one, it really was like lightning striking twice,” he said.
