Given our recent experience with the Covid-19 pandemic, it's little surprise some are feeling a sense of deja vu as yet another virus sinks its teeth into the global community.
University of Auckland associate professor and vaccine expert Dr Helen Petousis-Harris tells the Front Page podcast that the WHO's emergency setting was a call to action rather than an indication that we should all panic.
"This isn't a disease like Covid in that it's not super infectious," she says.
Monkeypox is spread through close contact with someone who has been infected with the virus.
"You can get monkeypox from sleeping in the same linen as somebody, by wearing their clothes and certainly from hugging and kissing."
While the virus has spread rapidly across the gay community in Europe and the United States, Petousis-Harris says transmission isn't contingent on sexual orientation.
"It's a very democratic virus, it will infect anybody," she says.
"This is something we need to be aware of and we also need to be wary of not stigmatising communities about this because it won't help in controlling this."
Petousis-Harris says that one of the biggest local risks in the local context is that the virus is used as a weapon in prejudiced narratives – which also became apparent during the early stages of the Covid-19 outbreak.
"With Covid, we saw the stigmatisation of people of Asian origin at the beginning," she says.
"We also see this play out with other emerging infectious diseases that affect people who are poor. You often have people saying: 'Ah, it's just because of hygiene or whatever…. It's not a real danger'."
Petousis-Harris says prejudiced narratives could lead to vulnerable groups being targeted while also contributing to others not taking the virus seriously enough.
The good news is that the smallpox vaccine has proven effective against monkeypox – and we have a global stockpile of the vaccine around the world.
"The reason there are stockpiles of smallpox vaccines is because smallpox has remained a bioterrorism threat, so maintaining research on the vaccine and therapeutic anti-virals has been ongoing all of this time, even though the disease was eradicated by 1980," she says.
"There are not only stockpiles that have been maintained for decades but also new vaccines."
While the vaccine is available, distribution hasn't gone smoothly in the places worst affected by the virus.
US infectious disease expert Dr Carlos del Rio has described the efforts to get a vaccine in the United States as the "Hunger Games", telling media that there simply aren't enough doses of the vaccine to meet demand.
Petousis-Harris isn't surprised.
Demand for the monkeypox vaccine is growing quickly around the world. Photo / Getty Images
"Whenever you've got a limited availability of something that's desired by many, you're going to run into problems," she says.
And while millions of doses of the vaccine are stockpiled, she says the original smallpox vaccine isn't as safe as it could be.
"This vaccine would not be considered very safe by today's standards. It has lots of side effects and some of them could be quite severe. Also, people who are immunocompromised would not be able to receive it.
"This is why we've had the development of a new vaccine, and there's not so much available of that one. And that's the one that we will want to use, particularly as this disease is not killing people by and large."
In recent weeks, the Ministry of Health said it was still acquiring doses of the smallpox vaccine to protect the local community against the virus.
The variant of monkeypox spreading around the world has a much lower mortality rate than other variants that could kill as many as 10 per cent of those infected.
For this reason, Petousis-Harris is confident that the country should be able to handle the outbreak if the number of cases does escalate further.
"We know how it's transmitted, we know how to prevent it, and we have treatments. We just have to work with communities to make sure that it's not stigmatised."
• The Front Page is a daily news podcast from the New Zealand Herald, available to listen to every weekday from 5am.
