A signal abnormality indicates a density gradient, i.e., that neurons have died and there is now less mass in that region. My relative that I discuss in the video was in a coma for 4 days, followed by a delirium. Before the illness, he was young, in good health, and on vacation with his wife and young children.
Coronavirus Encephalitis image source
50% of Monkeypox cases have neuropsychiatric symptoms, suggesting the possibility of subclinical encephalitis:
Children under 8 at greatest risk to have severe case of monkeypox
NEJM article showing monkeypox found in semen:
Monkeypox shelf-stable for days to weeks even in water and on refrigerated food, and months to years inside of scabs:
Gloves are recommended to prevent catching monkeypox from fomites and sores (nitrile is better than vinyl especially for extended wear) when interacting indirectly or directly with active monkeypox patients (like this guy in Spain traveling mainly on the train, who claimed his doctor told him it was fine to leave the house). I am wearing gloves in high-traffic areas like mass transit or similar.
Other virus families capable of disrupting the blood-brain barrier and causing encephalitis:
Herpes simplex virus 1 and 2 (you probably have this virus and it is the most common cause of viral encephalitis and the only one that has a specific treatment - acyclovir)
Varicella-zoster virus, which causes both chickenpox and shingles
Video transcript:
Hey there: This is just a video to encourage you to please take monkeypox seriously. It can go to your brain and cause encephalitis. And you do not want to get encephalitis.
I am a relative of a person who had encephalitis about 3 decades ago. This person woke up paralyzed from a coma in a different state than he had been in when he fell into the coma, and he was never the same. He was never able to really return to the kind of work he was doing before, not for lack of trying. And everyone who was connected to him was traumatized by the experience, and by all the experiences that came afterwards that were a direct result of the fact that this individual had a brain injury from a virus that caused brain inflammation, and swelling, as well as specific lesions throughout the brain that destroyed small pockets of brain tissue.
This person had a virus that causes a pox rash. It wasn’t monkeypox, and it wasn’t in the orthopox virus family. It was in the same family that causes chickenpox, and we’re not sure exactly which member of that family did it. It could have been chickenpox, because chickenpox stays in your body long-term. But I think there’s 7 families in the herpes family that can cause viral encephalitis, most of which also can cause a pox rash. So the little lesions inside of the brain - these little pox rashes - that were caused by the virus, caused whatever they were forming on to die.
And while your brain is plastic, and that means it can rewire itself. You can form new connections and prune back those connections to form a functional structure, otherwise there would be no point of therapy because it wouldn’t make anything better. While the brain is plastic, it is not infinitely plastic, and it does not travel infinitely fast, either. The plasticity has to go at a certain rate. And some degrees of damage are not recoverable because the plasticity that would need to happen already happened at an earlier phase of development, and therefore is not gonna happen again. Metabolically, it’s just not gonna happen. For some neurological structures, you really get one bite at the apple.
And these lesions can form holes that were big enough to see on a scan. So we’re talking about a macrostructural level of local damage, leaving the other tissue surrounding it intact. And in this person’s case, the lesions, while they were throughout the brain, predominated in the right hemisphere. And right hemisphere disorder which is a category of neurological disorders are notoriously hard to treat. And the reason they’re hard to treat is that we evolved and that evolution took a particular course. And the course that it took is one that means that the right half of our experience is processed by both the left and the right hemisphere, whereas the left half of our experience, is only processed by the right hemisphere. So people who get damage to the right hemisphere, from the perspective of the part that’s working, there’s no problem. So it’s hard to get those patients to understand that there’s a problem. They have a neurological incapacity to recognize that there is an issue, and further the lesions were also concentrated in the frontal lobe. And the frontal lobe is the seat of judgment, especially the prefrontal cortex. And judgment develops over a lifetime of experiences. And so this had an indescribable number of implications that were devastating to him, and were devastating to his immediate family, and were devastating to all of his relatives, including me.
So please understand that monkeypox is not limited to people of a certain sexual orientation or a certain sex class and like COVID, monkeypox spreads in respiratory droplets. COVID also spreads in saliva - excuse me, monkeypox also spreads in saliva. And further, monkeypox spreads through skin to skin contact, and there is reason to suspect that you might be able to catch it simply from sexual fluids because sexual fluids do test positive for it when the person has an active case. So it’s a serious threat. And there’s already a vaccine, but it will take time for people to get vaccinated, so until then, please do everything you can to limit the spread. This is a very serious pandemic.
I know we’re all tired of being in a pandemic. We’re all tired of thinking about it. And we’re all really, really wanting to believe that this one won’t affect us. But we can prevent people from getting encephalitis. Even one person’s being prevented from getting encephalitis, it is really - I cannot put a value on that, as somebody that knows the meaning of that word. Please take it seriously.
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