By: Aurora Cai
First chickenpox and now monkeypox? What is up with these animal names? I am pretty sure you already know what chickenpox is, but you might be wondering about monkeypox. A monkeypox outbreak occurs when a monkeypox virus is infected.
Even though it might seem like it, monkeypox is unrelated to chickenpox. The monkeypox virus is in the same family of viruses as the virus that causes smallpox, the variola virus. There have been at least 3,846 US cases and more than 6,000 cases worldwide.
As we already know, smallpox and chickenpox are pretty deadly, but monkeypox is rarely fatal. So, should America prepare for monkeypox? Preparing for monkeypox is a good idea because it helps save more lives, it prevents further spread to different places, and it gives us time to find a vaccine.
Even though few patients die from monkeypox, people only live once. You can see what happened when we ignored Covid – 19 first. So many people died, and more than 10,000 people were ill, this caused a lot of destruction in our hearts, this also scared so many people in fear that they would soon join the dead. Although only 5% of the people who get monkeypox die, it can still cause a lot of grief and sadness. By preparing, we can make sure fewer people die and we have relief from what will happen when we didn’t prepare.
Preventing the spread of monkeypox is also really important. You can see what happened when we didn’t prevent the spread of Covid, everything was getting out of hand, and we lost so many parts of our lives. According to Cleveland Clinic, “Prevention depends on decreasing human contact with infected animals and limiting person-to-person spread.” By preventing the spread of monkeypox we can restrict the disease from going any further into our lives. We can also make sure this never happens again when we prevent the spread.
We already have vaccines for chickenpox and smallpox. But if we don’t find a vaccine for monkeypox we can have the same results as chickenpox and smallpox before finding the vaccine for them. If we prepare, we will get enough time to form a vaccine, unlike with COVID we didn’t prepare and it took a long time to create a vaccine. The World Health Organization stated, “Vaccines used during the smallpox eradication programme also provided protection against monkeypox. Newer vaccines have been developed of which one has been approved for prevention of monkeypox” As well as that, so many people had a terrible time living in the hospital, while they were still preparing a vaccine for COVID. With a vaccine, we can focus on our daily lives without having to worry about this new disease.
Everything eventually comes back to the idea that America should prepare for monkeypox because it can, save so many lives, prevent the spread of the disease to other people, and with time vaccines will form. So even though you think chickens and monkeys might be harmless, the diseases chickenpox and monkeypox aren’t.
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