Thread by @HelenBranswell

1. Short #MPX 🧵
There's an interesting #monkeypox paper today in @Eurosurveillanc from researchers in Barcelona. They took 147 specimens from 12 MPX patients, sampling saliva, semen and feces as well as skin/lesion samples and swabs of the throat and anus.

2. They found a high level of positivity among those samples — including finding #MPX DNA in the saliva of all 12 patients in their study. They also found #monkeypox virus DNA in semen (7/9 cases), urine (9/12 cases) and feces (8/12 cases). This raises an obvious question.

3. Sadly, this paper can't answer that question, which is: Can #MPX be transmitted through contact with bodily fluids/products? It can't answer it because the researchers didn't try to grow virus from the specimens, so it's not clear if this was viral debris or infectious virus.

4. But the paper adds to 2 previous reports (from Italy & Germany) that suggest there's a possibility #monkeypox could be transmitted through contact with bodily fluids. In all 3 papers, numbers are small. This Spanish paper has the largest number of subjects.

5. The paper also reports that 4 of the 12 #monkeypox patients enrolled in the study had been previously vaccinated against smallpox. That could raise concerns about how much cross-protection a smallpox vaccination decades ago offers against #MPX. But this requires digging into.

6. Of the 4 #MPX patients who said they'd been vaccinated against smallpox, 1 was in his 30s, 2 in their 40s & only 1 over 50 yo.
I've reached out to the researchers to ask if they confirmed previous smallpox vaccination by checking medical records. Awaiting an answer.

7. Smallpox was declared eradicated 42 years ago. Some countries stopped vaccinating about a decade before eradication was declared. Seems not wholly likely someone in his 30s would have been vaccinated against smallpox.
@Eurosurveillanc paper is here: eurosurveillance.org/content/10.280…

8. I heard back from Mikel Martinez, one of the authors of the @Eurosurveillanc paper. The information on smallpox vaccination seems to have come from a form the patient filled out. "We were surprised & that’s why I wanted to report the findings but also be cautious about them."