Victorian health authorities have issued a monkeypox warning after infections almost doubled in a month, making the state an epicentre of the virus in Australia.
Cases in Victoria rose from 22 at the start of August to 40 on Saturday, accounting for nearly half of the nation’s 89 infections to date.
The surge prompted calls to hit Melbourned hard with vaccines from the national stockpile to prevent the disease from spreading around Australia.
Deputy Chief Health Officer Deborah Friedman told The Sunday Age cases had initially been in travellers returning from overseas but now locally acquired transmissions were rising rapidly.
“We are pretty concerned about the increase in local transmission particularly as it doesn’t appear to be happening in other states,” Associate Professor Friedman told the newspaper.
“We don’t really know why.
“There are currently 40 cases of monkeypox recorded in Victoria, about half of which have been locally acquired.”
“Within two weeks we have seen a quite substantial increase in locally acquired cases, so it is now 50 per cent.”
LGBTQ health advocate Simon Ruth told The Sunday Age more vaccines were needed.
“They should be releasing what they have in the national stockpile and hitting Melbourne hard to prevent it spreading around the country.”
Monkeypox is not a sexually transmitted disease but is spread predominantly from skin-to-skin contact.
Although it has been mainly impacting at-risk groups such as men who have sex with men, it can also be transmitted to anyone through close contact.
Victoria’s Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton warned that supplies of the vaccine were limited.
At-risk groups are being urged to take preventative measures such as limiting sexual partners and to get the smallpox jab.
“We owe it to gay and bisexual men to inform them where the risk is now and to support reducing risk,” Professor Sutton said in a tweet on Saturday.
“Vaccines are currently in short supply but many more doses on the way.”
Vaccines are available in a number of sexual health clinics across Victoria.
The federal government secured 450,000 doses of the third generation Jynneos smallpox vaccine earlier this month, with the first delivery of 22,000 doses distributed around the country.
The remainder of the vaccines will arrive on Australian shores later this year and into early 2023.
The first monkeypox case was recorded in Australia in May.
Earlier this month, a leading health expert warned Australians not to dismiss monkeypox as a “disease of gay men” .
Burnet Institute chief executive Brendan Crabb said the community should take more precautions against the virus, with monkeypox looming as another large infectious disease issue, coming off the back of COVID-19.
“We should be acting in a precautionary way, not hand-waving it away as a disease of gay men,” he said.
“That’s not the way you (should) treat new things emerging this way. You act in a strong precautionary principle way. You shut it down until you know more, and unfortunately, we’re not doing that.
“We have the big lessons from COVID-19 which we just don’t seem to have learned with respect to monkeypox.”
Symptoms include rashes, lesions or sores — particularly around the genitals — as well as fevers, aches and swollen lymph nodes.
The World Health Organisation last month declared monkeypox a public health emergency of international concern.
There have been more than 35,000 cases of the disease around the world and 12 related deaths, the health organisation reports.
Of Australia’s 89 recorded monkeypox infections, 40 are in Victoria and 39 are in NSW, while there are also cases in Queensland (3), Western Australia (3), the ACT (2), and South Australia (2).
-with AAP
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