Hidalgo County Health Authority Ivan Melendez said Tuesday that monkeypox is very unlikely to pose a significant public health situation in local schools and cautioned against the community using its experience with COVID-19 to understand the more recent public health threat it’s facing.
Hidalgo County confirmed its first case of the monkeypox Monday, the first day of school for many local districts, and began providing a relatively small allotment of vaccines to residents last week.
Briefing trustees at an Edinburg CISD Board meeting Tuesday, Melendez said concerns over monkeypox being a significant issue at schools are unfounded.
“Probably one of the most common questions that I get…which you’re going to get: ‘Do I have to be worried that my kids are gonna come to school and their teacher and someone there is gonna give them monkeypox?’ And the answer is absolutely not,” he said.
Transmission on campus would be theoretically possible, Melendez said, but he characterized that chance as far-fetched with a sports analogy.
“If I get in the ring with — what’s this guy — Camilo Alvarez, could I beat him?” he said. “I mean, it’s possible, but very doubtful. And so that’s my point, that anything is possible, but not very likely. So you don’t have to worry about that.”
According to Melendez, 95% to 97% of people testing positive for monkeypox are men having sex with men, with about 40% of them being positive for HIV. Although monkeypox is not a sexually transmitted disease, risk factors include having more than three sex partners a week, a diagnosis for an STD in the last four months, anonymous sex or travel to areas where the virus is endimic, he said, noting that individuals who cohabitate with someone who gets monkeypox are also at risk.
“It’s not like ‘Are you a school teacher?’ Do you go to a public school? Do you work in the hospital?’ It’s a complete different stratification. Do not make the mistake of comparing COVID-19 to monkeypox,” Melendez said.
Melendez said that logic explains why monkeypox has not been met by a declaration of some medical emergency locally, in contrast to COVID-19. He said that sort of declaration would require a belief in monkeypox being an imminent danger to the community, a belief Melendez does not hold.
“When you have one case out of 1.2 million people — we probably have 10, 12 — but if you have one reported case, I don’t see it as an imminent emergency,” he said. “Is it an imminent emergency to that particular population? Probably so, so we absolutely need to be aware of it, (be) cognisant of it, (and) provide them the help that is available.”
The county began distributing a limited sum of monkeypox vaccines last week, focusing on at-risk populations.
According to Melendez, about 50 people were vaccinated as of Friday out of a total of 1,250 available doses. The county is not expecting to receive anymore vaccines for the virus until November, he said, but the county is trying to use its allotment quickly.
“We’re not gonna let them sit on the shelf. We’re not gonna do what we did with COVID, where if you weren’t this and this you couldn’t get it,” Melendez said, noting that vaccines may be opened to people who are not at high-risk within a couple of weeks.
