Even if COVID-19 did not happen, this would still get a lot of play because of the name which lends itself to sensationalism and fear. Monkeypox, flesh-eating bacteria, mad cow disease ... these are the things that get played up, while Clostridium difficile, Shigella, and other infectious diseases with obscure names mostly get a collective shrug.

Wait wait wait, are you sure it's not the other way around? That those things don't get those names because they're played up? Monkeypox, flesh-eating bacteria, mad cow disease all have boring scientific names but these are the names the media uses to play them up!

I don't know how these names are assigned or created, but regardless when you have something like "Mad Cow Disease" instead of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy it's more likely to be covered and even sensationalized by mainstream media.

I think some scientists have recognized this, after such terms caused stigma and misplaced concern. "Crack baby" was one of them:

The term “crack baby” is an urban legend masquerading as a medical diagnosis. It is a label that stigmatizes, marginalizes and endangers children and their mothers who are desperately in need of care. Born from the combination of an ongoing crisis in urban health care and draconian zero-tolerance drug policies, the crack-baby myth thrives even though it has no basis in science.

Due to a combination of insufficient data and public fears that followed the crack cocaine epidemic of the mid-1980s, crack was alleged to be harmful to the cognitive and emotional development of children. Sensational news stories warned of the damage that crack would inflict on a generation of children and thus on society in general. A few scientists went beyond the data from incomplete research and contributed to the hype with inaccurate comments.

https://www.brown.edu/Administration/News_Bureau/2003-04/03-...

> I don't know how these names are assigned or created, but regardless when you have something like "Mad Cow Disease" instead of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy it's more likely to be covered and even sensationalized by mainstream media.

I don't think you've established this though. It may be more likely to be covered for entirely unrelated reasons and have that name as a consequence or coincidence. You're confusing correlation with causation.

> The term “crack baby” is an urban legend masquerading as a medical diagnosis

There are thousands of these and the media doesn't play up let alone care about most of them.

mad cow / cjd / prion disease is in a different league from all the others you mentioned; there's very little recourse and it is scary how difficult it is to sterilize anything that may have been exposed.

and there's no way of knowing if you have prions in your body, and when your brain will turn to mush. CJD is nightmare fuel.

Don‘t forget bird flu and swine flu

SARS, MERS, and Swineflu all garnered attention at the time. An outbreak of a new disease is interesting, regardless of what happened the last 2+ years.

It's noteworthy for sure, however I am more annoyed by how it is reported. It was always like that for sure, however when the same medium proclaims being the arbiter of truth (fact checkers) I get really disgusted.

Of course all diseases gain traction in the media in some way. That's normal.

I'm sure this is hyperinflated in the media due to covid however. This monkeypox news is everwhere and most countries have literally a handful of cases, most of them traced to sexual contact (which means large spread is not likely). Really, this warrants the same disinterest as we had in covid in early Feb 2020. But instead it's getting treated as if it's covid-2022. Some caution is of course warranted but I think this is really a knee-jerk reaction.

They're already talking about mandatory quarantines and reporting here (monkeypox dashboard, lol). It would probably be a postage stamp on page 10 if it hadn't been for covid, less than bird flu or swine flu was. Even though the mandatory measures are mostly gone, we still have a ways to go to be really 'back to normal' where people are not constantly worried about diseases. A pandemic is a once-in-a-century event and we shouldn't treat every disease as one until it is.

Belgium already has a compulsory 21 day quarantine for monkeypox in place after some cases were linked to two rave events, one in Spain and the other in Belgium.

People are already spreading misinformation online about the disease.

This article is from an Utah and most likely Mormon news source, so expect some bias:

https://www.deseret.com/2022/5/23/23138042/monkeypox-2022-be...

It sounds like these 'rave' events weren't really dance events but more like orgies. Because also there the infections were identified to be not from incidental contact but from sex.

Ebola was big in the 90's, even made a best-selling book and film about it (with Dustin Hoffman) but it only impacted certain African nations, and for decades. I feel the same way as you, and my gut tells me it is a little of both: an actual scary virus that probably won't explode COVID-like, but media hype worthy because every new outbreak of something awful has always been good sensationalism. I look at articles from science sources versus USA Today-like sources for my own opinion.

I have an alternative. Maybe it’s not sensationalism, maybe it’s just that journalists do not know the future, and this could potentially become a significant health issue.

There were at least two Tom Clancy novels about ebola as well (though it was a genetically modified and weaponized version in one of those instances)

Since we are sharing Ebola in pop fiction, There is 2008 Tamil movie with a weaponized Ebola[1] as well.

[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0479651/

So I got to spend an afternoon with one of those mad scientists from Porton Down, the UK biological and chemicals weapon testing place. The stuff they have there makes Ebola look like a walk in the park.

So there are parts of the body the immune system cant go, like the gonads, and eyes, the viruses like Ebola can get in there like toxoplasmosis (eye floaters from cat faeces) and then you become a carrier. Men can pass on Ebola through semen which was being seen in Africa not so long ago and yet still test negative for Ebola!

And then there is global warming like the Artic permafrost thawing that has the potential to release long since forgotten threats. https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/Permafr...

So with increased numbers of people travelling and the global population going up, the risks keep going up so I'm not surprised WHO want to take control of this globally. At least they issued a directorate to reduce the number of cycles a PCR test goes through. Putting aside somewhere between 80 and 85 different PCR testing machines, which are not standardised, some countries were only using a cycle threshold of 18 whilst others were using a higher cycle threshold of 45. The cycle threshold can be likened to microscope magnifications, at some point the fluorescence of past viral debris will show up like a live virus the higher the cycle threshold goes.

Now with out this WHO directorate, you would probably be seeing more lockdowns in some parts of the world and other parts spreading Covid like wildfire. Sure its hard to argue things could have been better or worst when we cant jump into parallel universes, but COVID isnt over yet and monkeypox could trigger more lockdowns.

It also shows that countries need global guidance.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the WHO and CDC and similar orgs shouldn't be all over this, but maybe the press should wait until the experts start sounding alarms, instead of sounding it themselves? I honestly don't know, given the train wreck that happened with COVID.

The news is a soap opera for serious people.

> The biggest outbreak of monkeypox in the U.S. occurred in 2003, when health authorities found 47 confirmed and probable cases in six states — Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Missouri, Ohio, and Wisconsin. “All people infected with monkeypox in this outbreak became ill after having contact with pet prairie dogs. The pets were infected after being housed near imported small mammals from Ghana. This was the first time that human monkeypox was reported outside of Africa.” During this outbreak, 28 adults and two children were given the smallpox vaccine and “no serious adverse events were reported.” Not only did this outbreak not turn into a major public-health crisis, it barely made the national news. When the New York Times wrote about it back in June 2003, the story ran on page A20.

Emphasis added, source:

https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/what-you-nee...

With some exceptions the youngest people who received the smallpox vaccine in America are now 50, so it’s possible that we’ll see more monkeypox cases than previously (the smallpox vaccine provides 85% protection). We were able to eradicate smallpox completely because it has no animal reservoir, unlike monkeypox which also infects rodents and monkeys.

It can still go either way. It's likely enough that the global spread will end with identified cases in the low thousands though (people that are shedding virus tend to have readily identified symptoms).

Also, this one is likely similar to AIDS where it’s actually spreading as an STD. In that case you wouldn’t learn it as the media would think that’s gross and not want to report it.

I'm not sure why you're being downvoted. As of a few days ago all but one of the cases was someone with recent male/male sexual contact and presented with lesions around the anus.

It would be incredibly foolish to think, however, that sexuality has any impact on your vulnerability. Do not come into bodily contact with someone exhibiting lesions, period.

Of course. But most transmission happens without any visible lesions.

Broadly speaking:

1) Diseases are a growing issue, with increased human population and travel.

2) It's hard to predict which ones will become pandemics.

It's kind of like asking whether a game of Russian Roulette is a big deal or just a story to get hits. You don't know until you pull the trigger.

Of course it would. Look at the attention paid to past Ebola outbreaks that mostly didn't even leave West Africa. Hell, one single doctor was repatriated and treated at a CDC isolation lab, and that single case led to a huge amount of panic and controversy. Monkeypox is a mysterious new disease that is much less deadly (good!) but has made it to several continents (surprising!) and has done it against all historical precedent.

The crazy thing about exponential growth is how quick it is, almost regardless of the base.

If I see 1 case one week, then 10 cases two weeks later, and pushing 100 two weeks after that, it’s pretty scary.

Well, this is the reason why a big deal is being made out of monkeypox. Covid is no longer an adequate reason to justify locking the world down.

Probably.

As far as I know, they aren't air transmittable, so I don't see the problem.

It can spread by droplets (lesions do develop in the mouth).

Perhaps as big as h1n1 however decade+ long ago that was.

I think it would - people have mostly forgotten about Smallpox due to a very successful vaccination campaign but it is still in public memory.

Probably not, there have been countless outbreaks and epidemics in the past, all got some attention and media scare. But we haven't had a pandemic since 1920s, so I would bet on the 99.9% chance of it being just a media scare, rather than a new pandemic.

This was certainly my bet in January and February 2020 -- "this is like H1N1, it won't be that bad" or "it'll be like SARS and be contained."

You mean, haven't had a pandemic since 2020?

Not counting the current ongoing pandemic, the last pandemic was 2009/10's swine flu pandemic, which went on to infect 20%+ of the world's population and kill 1M+.

there were zero pandemics for 100 years between 1920s and 2020s

That's complete BS. Swine flu was a full blown pandemic barely a decade a ago and HIV is still ongoing one.

> pandemics... between 1920s and 2020s

1956-58, 1968, 1981- ...