(NEW YORK) — The same month the U.S. Supreme Court issued its landmark ruling overturning Roe v. Wade, a couple in Kansas, thousands of miles away from Washington, D.C., faced their own abortion decision.
Breanna O’Brien said she was 20 weeks pregnant with her first child in June and in the process of decorating the nursery when she and her husband Kyle received a devastating diagnosis.
The O’Briens said doctors told them the fetus had Xeroderma pigmentosum group D (XPD) and Trichothiodystrophy (TTD), two rare and severe genetic conditions that they said can cause significant disability and a shortened life span.
“I thought what is this, like it doesn’t make sense,” Breanna O’Brien told ABC News’ Rachel Scott. “You’re talking about one in a million and it just happens to be our baby and it’s our first baby, our first pregnancy, an incredibly wanted baby.”
The O’Briens said they spoke with genetic counselors and parents of children with TTD and XPD before making the decision to terminate the pregnancy.
“The more we learned about it, I could not put my baby through that,” Breanna O’Brien said. “It’s a cruel disease and it’s really horrible.”
“It would not be a normal life and the quality of life would be so low that I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy,” Kyle O’Brien added.
The O’Briens, who described themselves as devout Catholics, said they struggled with their church’s teachings on abortion and their own experience.
“Being a Catholic, there’s a serious sense of Catholic guilt and that you’re going to hell for making this decision,” said Breanna O’Brien. “And I would rather go to hell than have my baby live in a prison for three short years.”
However, once they made what Breanna O’Brien called the “best decision” for their baby, the couple said they learned they would not be able to access abortion care in their home state of Kansas.
Kansas permits abortions up to 22 weeks of pregnancy, and has additional regulations that include requirements for counseling, parental consent for minors and a waiting period.
Breanna O’Brien said she was not able to access abortion care in Kansas before 22 weeks, so she had to travel two states away, to Illinois, to have an abortion.
“It was preposterous that we had to go to an out-of-state clinic, that’s not at a hospital, to get the care we need,” she said, adding that the clinic she went to served people from 22 different states.
The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 ruling on abortion rights, gave power back to states to decide abortion access.
In the weeks since the court’s ruling, at least 15 states have ceased nearly all abortion services.
Nearly all of the states surrounding Kansas — including Oklahoma, Missouri and Arkansas — have issued near-total abortion bans since the Supreme Court’s decision. Kansas has so far kept its law allowing abortion care before 22 weeks of pregnancy.
On Aug. 2, voters in Kansas voted on an abortion-related amendment in the first state-level test on abortion access since the Supreme Court’s ruling.
In an election that saw record turnout, voters rejected an amendment to remove the right to abortion from the state’s constitution. Had the amendment passed, it would have given the state’s GOP-controlled legislature the power to pass new abortion restrictions.
The O’Briens said that while they are still mourning the loss of their unborn child, they wanted to share their story as they see abortion access impacted across the country.
“You have your beliefs and you can make that choice when you have it, but we have the freedom here to make the best choice for our son,” said Kyle O’Brien. “You don’t think it can happen and you don’t think you’d ever exercise the freedom until you need it.”
(NEW YORK) — Ashton Kutcher says he’s “lucky to be alive” after he says he developed vasculitis, a rare condition.
In a first look from Monday night’s new episode of National Geographic’s Running Wild with Bear Grylls: The Challenge from Access Hollywood, the Punk’d creator opened up to the British adventurer about developing a rare disorder, while the two walked through the jungles of Costa Rica.
“Two years ago, I had this weird, super rare form of vasculitis,” Kutcher said. “It knocked out my vision, it knocked out my hearing — it knocked out all my equilibrium. It took me, like, a year to build it all back up.”
While Kutcher did not mention what specific disorder he had, vasculitis is generally defined as swelling that affects the walls of your blood vessels, according to the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. Also known as angiitis or arteritis, some cases of vasculitis may be caused by autoimmune disorders that occur “when your immune hurts your blood vessels by mistake,” according to the institute.
The National Institutes of Health said it’s unknown what happens, but when it does, the blood vessels swell and can close off. Symptoms can vary depending on what kind of vasculitis a person has, but general symptoms include tiredness, fever, aches and pains, loss of appetite and weight loss, according to the NIH.
Vasculitis can also cause ear and nose problems, eye problems, genital ulcers, heart palpitations, joint pain, lung problems, nerve issues, skin rashes or swollen, dry lips or tongue, according to the NIH. Treatment can include prescription medicines or over-the-counter pain medication to relieve symptoms and reduce inflammation, the agency said.
“You don’t really appreciate it until it’s gone, until you go, ‘I don’t know if I’m ever gonna be able to see again. I don’t know if I’m ever gonna be able to hear again. I don’t know if I’m ever gonna be able to walk again,'” Kutcher told Grylls in the clip.
He added, “The minute you start seeing your obstacles as things that are made for you, to give you what you need, then life starts to get fun, right? You start surfing on top of your problems instead of living underneath them.”
The new episode of Running Wild with Bear Grylls, premieres Monday at 9 p.m. ET on National Geographic. In clips teasing the new episode on social media, Kutcher is seen pushing himself to the limit as Grylls takes him through the Costa Rican jungle and crossing a ravine. Clips also show Grylls pranking Kutcher about crocodiles in a river as they look for fish to eat.
You can watch Kutcher’s adventure on Disney+ starting Aug. 10.
The Walt Disney Company is the parent company of ABC News and Good Morning America.
(NEW YORK) — The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has deployed a federal team to New York to investigate the case of polio detected in Rockland County.
The team will also help administer vaccinations in the county, according to ABC station WABC-TV.
It’s unclear how long the CDC will remain in the county or if the findings will be released to the public.
On July 21, the New York State Health Department announced an unvaccinated patient in Rockland County had contracted a case of vaccine-derived polio, the first case in the United States in nearly a decade.
This means the patient was infected by someone who received the oral polio vaccine, which is no longer used in the U.S.
Unlike the polio vaccine given by injection, which uses an inactive virus, the oral vaccine uses a live weakened virus.
In rare cases, the virus spreading through sewage can affect those who are unvaccinated. This is different from wild polio, which infects people by circulating naturally in the environment.
Since then, it’s been revealed the patient was a previously healthy 20-year-old man who had traveled to Europe. He was diagnosed after he went to the hospital when he developed paralysis in his legs.
Last week, the state health commissioner said “hundreds” of people in New York could be infected after the virus was found in wastewater samples in multiple counties.
As of Aug. 5, 11 samples were genetically linked to the Rockland County patient including six samples collected in June and July from Rockland County and five samples collected in July from nearby Orange County, health department data shows.
New York State Health Commissioner Dr. Mary Bassett called on anybody who hasn’t received the polio vaccine to do so.
The statewide rate of polio vaccination is 78.96% while the Rockland County rate sits at 60.34%, state data shows. In Orange County, the rate is even lower at 58.66%.
“Based on earlier polio outbreaks, New Yorkers should know that for every one case of paralytic polio observed, there may be hundreds of other people infected,” Bassett said in a statement Thursday. “Coupled with the latest wastewater findings, the Department is treating the single case of polio as just the tip of the iceberg of much greater potential spread.”
The statement continued, “We must meet this moment by ensuring that adults, including pregnant people, and young children by 2 months of age are up to date with their immunization — the safe protection against this debilitating virus that every New Yorker needs.”
Neither the CDC nor the NYSDOH immediately returned ABC News’ request for comment.
(NEW YORK) — Scientists have made a distressing discovery on how global warming will affect known infectious diseases.
Climate hazards are expected to aggravate 58% of all known human pathogens, according to a study published Monday in Nature Climate Change. That’s over half of infectious diseases discovered since the end of the Roman Empire, Camilo Mora, a data analyst and associate professor in the Department of Geography and Environment at the University of Hawaii Manoa, told ABC News.
While the impact that climate change can have on human vulnerability to a range of diseases has been well accepted, the full threat climate change poses to humanity in the context of disease was unknown, according to the researchers. Past studies have primarily focused on specific groups of pathogens, such as bacteria or viruses, the response to certain hazards, such as heatwaves or increased flooding, or transmission types, such as food or water-borne.
Mora’s team systematically screened literature that revealed 3,213 empirical cases linking 286 unique, human pathogenic diseases to 10 climate hazards, such as warming, floods or drought. Of these, 277 pathogens were found to be aggravated by at least one climate hazard, with only nine pathogens “exclusively diminished” by climatic hazards, according to the study.
A whopping 58% of an authoritative list of infectious diseases documented to have impacted humanity have already been shown to be aggravated by climatic hazards — a finding the researchers found “shocking,” Mora said.
Examples of hazards include those that bring humans closer to pathogens, such as storms and floods, which then cause displacements associated with cases of Lassa fever or Legionnaires’ disease.
Other examples are events that bring pathogens closer to humans, in which warming increases in areas over which organisms that transmit diseases, such as Lyme disease, dengue and malaria, are active.
There is a broad taxonomic diversity of human pathogenic diseases, such as bacteria, viruses, animals, plants, fungi and protozoa, as well as transmission types — for example, vector-borne, airborne, direct contact — that can be affected by warming, heat waves, droughts, wildfires, extreme precipitation, floods and sea level rise, according to the study.
Shifts in the geographical range of species are one of the most common ecological indications of climate change, according to the study. Warming and precipitation changes, for instance, were associated with range expansion of vectors such as mosquitoes, ticks, fleas, birds and several mammals, which then were implicated in outbreaks by viruses, bacteria, animals and protozoans, including dengue, chikungunya, plague, Lyme disease, West Nile virus, Zika, trypanosomiasis, echinococcosis and malaria.
The researchers found 1,006 unique pathways in which climatic hazards, via different transmission types, resulted in cases of pathogenic diseases.
Warming at higher latitudes have allowed vectors and pathogens to survive winter, aggravating outbreaks by several viruses, such as an anthrax outbreak in the Arctic circle that may have stemmed from an ancient bacterial strain that emerged from an unearthed animal corpse as the frozen ground thawed, according to the study.
COVID-19 is an example of how one single disease can create a thematic change in society, Mora said, adding that he does not believe the most recent pandemic — and the animal-to-human transmission that likely caused it — could have happened without global warming.
This research reveals more evidence that humans will have difficulty adapting to climate change, especially those in developing countries, Mora said.
“The magnitude of the vulnerability when you think about one or two diseases — okay, sure, we can deal with that,” he said. “But when you’re talking about 58% of the diseases, and 58% of those diseases can be affected or triggered in 1,000 different ways. So that, to me, was also revealing of the fact that we’re not going to be able to adapt to climate change.”
Extreme weather events such as drought and wildfire in the West, flooding in both inland and coastal areas and extreme heat in places that previously did not experience such high temperatures are becoming more common, Mora said.
The findings reveal unique pathways in which climatic hazards can lead to disease, underlining the limited capacity for societal adaptation, and emphasizing the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the authors said.
(NEW YORK) — As more states enact near-total bans and restrictions on abortion, providers say many patients are experiencing delayed care which can force them into later stages of pregnancy.
Abortion care options are becoming more limited and complex in some cases, which often means higher costs for patients. For example, medication abortion, which is less costly than other options, is only an option up to 10 weeks into pregnancy.
The most recent data available, from 2017, shows the average cost of an abortion in the first trimester nationwide was about $550, whether it was medication or procedural, according to the Guttmacher Institute, which researches reproductive rights.
Any abortion care for pregnancies further along than 12 weeks costs more than that. The median cost of abortion care for pregnancies at 20 weeks in 2017 was $1,670, Dr. Rachel Jones, a principal research scientist at Guttmacher, told ABC News.
Jones said that access to abortion care for patients in their second trimester has always been limited, and those patients have always had to travel further.
Almost every clinic offers abortions up to nine and 10 weeks into pregnancy and 75% offer abortions until the second trimester, Jones said.
“After that, the percentage of clinics that offer abortion at each week of gestation starts dropping off. And so people are going to have to travel further to get to a facility that can provide care at those gestations. And of course this is all going to be incredibly exacerbated given the overturning of Roe,” Jones said.
Dr. Bhavik Kumar, a provider in Texas and the national medical spokesperson for Planned Parenthood, told ABC News that how far along a pregnancy has to be before costs go up varies between clinics and across states.
Whether a patient has insurance coverage is also a main factor in determining cost. In some states, patients may not have to pay anything because abortion is covered by insurance, Kumar said.
Abortions for pregnancies that are further along can cost more because of fewer healthcare professionals that can provide that care and their limited availability, abortion procedures becoming more complicated and requiring medications or abortions needing to happen over two days, Jones said.
Second trimester abortions could also require more surgical preparations like medications or dilators, sometimes an extra procedure to insert dilators, all of which requires more time in the clinic and is factored into higher costs, Kumar said.
When the pandemic first hit, Texas said abortions were not essential health care, forcing patients to travel across state lines or not get care. When abortion care resumed, a study documented that there were more patients coming in at later stages of pregnancy, Jones said.
Other abortion restrictions, like having to make in-person visits or having to return to a clinic before getting care can also delay care by several days and push patients from one trimester into another, Jones said, citing Guttmacher research.
When Texas was one of the only states implementing a ban, wait times were around one to three days. As time progressed, within one to two months, providers saw wait times jump to one to three weeks depending on which clinic you look at, Kumar said.
Kumar said he is seeing a lot of patients who are looking to get care in another state seeing delays of several days or several weeks and some clinics are so overwhelmed, they are not even making appointments.
States with the least restrictions, that do not have mandatory wait times are where Kumar says he is hearing about longer wait times.
“It seems like there’s sort of hotspots that are forming for abortion access and the states that come to mind are Illinois, Kansas, Colorado [and] California because of the lack of most restrictions and the ability to get care,” Kumar said.
Experts said waiting longer into pregnancy increases costs.
Dr. Katie McHugh, an abortion provider who works at three clinics in Indiana, told ABC News that abortions for pregnancies that are less than 14 weeks cost around $800.
These patients are getting medication abortions or simple procedures, McHugh said.
The cost of abortion for pregnancies further along than 14 weeks range from $900 to $1,200, depending on the stage of pregnancy and need for anesthesia or if the abortion is done over multiple days, McHugh said.
Some states like Indiana had mandated that abortion care be done in a hospital after a certain number of weeks, which costs “many thousands of dollars,” McHugh said. The cutoff for when care is required to be in a hospital is regulated by states and varies around the country.
It costs less to get care at a clinic than a hospital because clinics have less overhead costs. Abortions at later gestations cost more largely because they need to be done in a surgical or hospital setting, McHugh said.
Asked whether her clinic has received patients further into pregnancy because of bans or restrictions in their states, McHugh said “absolutely.”
“Most of the people that we’re seeing from out of state, had to be referred here because of the restrictions in their own states. And then some of them, they tried to be referred to here, but they can’t get here in time. And so then we are having to refer them to Illinois,” she said.
On Friday, Indiana became the first state to enact near-total abortion ban since the U.S. Supreme Court voted to overturn Roe.
Kumar said that for patients with medically complex pregnancies who need abortion care for health reasons, delaying their care complicates risks.
People likely to have complications like preeclampsia, gestational hypertension, high blood pressure, gestational diabetes or who have had past hemorrhages are also likely to be people who experience other barriers to access. Those people are often uninsured people, people of color and low-income people, Kumar said.
Patients who have to travel to get care also face other costs that vary from patient to patient.
“So much of that depends on where people are traveling from, how much work they have to miss, how much they have to pay in childcare, not to mention gas and lodging and all of those costs,” McHugh said.
(NEW YORK) — In early May, when the first cases of monkeypox surfaced in the United Kingdom and Europe, health officials in the United States advised Americans not to panic.
There had been outbreaks of the rare disease before that had been controlled with testing and vaccines, and experts were optimistic an outbreak of monkeypox in the U.S. could be contained.
“We’re working hard to contain the cases that are happening so they don’t spread onward,” Jennifer McQuiston, deputy director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s High Consequence Pathogens and Pathology division, said during a media briefing in May.
More than two months later, the situation appears to be much different.
As of Friday, there were more than 7,100 reported cases in the U.S. across 48 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, according to the CDC, resulting in the Department of Health and Human Services declaring the outbreak a public health emergency Thursday.
That stands in stark contrast to instances of the disease in the recent past — two travel-associated cases in 2021 and a small outbreak in 2003 linked to contact with pet prairie dogs, which were infected after being kept near small mammals from Ghana.
Currently, about 80,000 specimens per week are being tested and at least 600,000 vaccines have been distributed throughout the nation, health officials said during a media briefing Thursday.
While the federal government has acquired more than 1 million vaccine doses as part of the national stockpile preparedness program and has newly appointed monkeypox crisis coordinators, some public health experts interviewed by ABC News said the first cases in Europe back in May should have been a warning sign for the U.S. to ramp up testing and vaccination because of the possibility of community transmission.
Unlike COVID-19, monkeypox is more difficult to transmit, passing primarily through direct skin-to-skin contact. But there has been criticism leveled that it was a slow start and some mistakes made during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic were repeated.
“Quite frankly, the inability of the government and inability of federal public health to respond sooner than it did is what cost us here,” Dr. Perry Halkitis, dean of Rutgers School of Public Health, told ABC News.
The White House said Thursday President Joe Biden is getting “regularly briefed on monkeypox” and it’s an issue that is “top of mind” for him.
Lack of alarm bells
The first case of the current outbreak was reported in the U.K. on May 7. Soon cases began to crop up in countries in mainland Europe, such as in Portugal and Spain.
The U.S. did not see a case of monkeypox confirmed until May 19 in a Massachusetts patient. With only one case, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health cautioned the risk to the public was low.
But like the early days of the COVID-19 outbreak, some public health experts warned that cases were likely more widespread than was publicly known.
Halkitis said the U.S. should have immediately started assembling a task force and increasing the supply of tests and vaccines after the first monkeypox patient was confirmed in Europe, suggesting potential community transmission.
“When the disease first appeared, that should have rung alarm bells for people,” he said. “We know perfectly well from COVID how quickly things spread because of global travel. We should have been at that point acting immediately, putting task forces together, getting vaccines and we did not do that.”
“Now they’re going to put a task force together? It’s a little late,” Halkitis continued.
Testing criteria not broad enough
It was not until late June that the HHS announced it was expanding testing capacity and accessibility by shipping tests to five commercial laboratories nationwide.
Between mid-May and early June, U.S. laboratories had only tested a little more than 2,000 specimens from patients suspected to have monkeypox, a CDC report found.
However, testing has rapidly increased from 6,000 specimens per week in late June to more than 80,000 per week currently, CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said during a media briefing Thursday.
“As testing has increased, our capacity for testing has increased and far outpaced the demand,” she said. “So right now, we’re really only testing at about 10% of the capacity we have, and we are encouraging anyone who has a prospective rash that could be monkeypox to present for testing.”
The CDC currently recommends that people be tested only if they think they have monkeypox — including the telltale sign of a rash — or have had close contact with someone who has monkeypox.
But Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious diseases specialist at the University of California, San Francisco, said testing recommendations should be expanded to a few more groups because not all rashes look the same and some high-risk people may not know that they were even exposed.
“We should be testing much more than we’re testing now and I think we should loosen the criterion or guidance for who we should test,” he told ABC News. “I think we should flood the community with testing, just like in COVID.”
He also said because monkeypox does not always manifest as a rash on the skin — with sores sometimes appearing in the mouth, vagina or rectum — those at high-risk who don’t have a traditional rash should have swabs performed in those areas to test for monkeypox.
Delay in making vaccines available
In May, Biden called the level of exposure something “everybody should be concerned about” but that the country has vaccines and that it doesn’t rise to the level of concern of COVID.
So far, the U.S. secured 6.9 million doses for delivery by May 2023, according to the HHS, with 1.1 million made available to states for ordering.
Some experts say vaccines could have been distributed a lot more quickly. The U.S. government currently has a contract with Danish firm Bavarian Nordic to “finish and fill” Jynneos, a vaccine approved for both smallpox and monkeypox.
The bulk of the 1.1 million doses initially sat in a plant that needed to be inspected by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, a typical process for the agency.
Last month, the FDA said it had approved 786,000 doses to be released after it finished inspecting the plant and determined the vaccines being formulated there met its standards. The investigation only took about six weeks, much faster than typical for the FDA.
“Six weeks is pretty fast for that,” Dr. Gregory Poland, head of the Mayo Clinic’s Vaccine Research Group, told ABC News. “What the argument would be is that the three-year-shelf life is too short.”
As soon as vials are filled with the vaccine, a three-year ticking clock to expiration begins. Poland says the FDA may have held off on signing off to try to get the vaccine to as many people as possible before this occurred.
However, demand is far outpacing supply. About 600,000 doses have been delivered and there are 1.1 million people eligible to be vaccinated.
Currently, the U.S. only uses the Jynneos vaccine, not another smallpox vaccine called ACAM2000 — which the U.S. has in a stockpile — because the latter can cause side effects in people with certain conditions, such as those who are immunocompromised.
But Poland says the vaccine should be used and people can be screened to make sure they don’t have any conditions that put them at risk.
“I understand reluctance to use it but, especially if monkeypox really starts exploding, I don’t think you’ll have a choice at that point,” he said. “I think if your choice is we’ve got nothing or we’ve got this, that’s easy for me.”
To increase the number of doses available, FDA Commissioner Dr. Robert Califf said during a media call on Thursday the agency has “identified a potential solution.”
“We’re considering an approach … that would allow health care providers to use an existing one-dose vial of the vaccine to administer a total of up to five separate doses,” he said.
The vaccine would be given in a smaller, shallower injection under the skin, a method Califf said would still be safe and effective but would allow up to five doses to be pulled from one vial.
Hesitation to declare a public health emergency
The HHS on Thursday declared monkeypox a public health emergency, 78 days after the first U.S. case was detected in May and about two weeks after the World Health Organization did the same.
It also comes two days after Biden named a national monkeypox team to help combat the outbreak and help increase the availability of tests, treatments and vaccines.
Larry Gostin, a former CDC and WHO consultant who has been advising the White House on monkeypox response, said the announcement could be a “turning point” in the nation’s health response after a “lackluster start.”
“It’s coming very, very late,” Gostin, also a professor of medicine at Georgetown University., told ABC News’ “Start Here.” “It’s not a time to panic, but it’s absolutely a time to get serious. And I hope that this will be a pivotal turning point for the administration after a lackluster start.”
By issuing a declaration, HHS will be able to take a series of actions including accessing funds set aside for such an emergency as well as appointing personnel to positions directly responding to the emergency. It will also help speed up test and vaccine distribution.
“One thing that’s been hampered from the beginning is money,” Chin-Hong said. “Money means personnel, it means even delivering medications to patients, it means diverting people away from other activities temporarily to try to focus on one outbreak instead of focusing on 10 million other things.”
Before the U.S. declared an emergency, New York, Illinois and California all declared their own emergencies. But without a national declaration, it meant states couldn’t access federal resources.
“California, Illinois and New York might be able to cobble stuff from their own state funds, but they can’t really use federal funds — unless it’s been like some puny money for random emergencies in the future — because there’s no dedicated monkeypox money from a federal level,” he said. “You know, a lot of the efforts in each of the parts of the country is hampered by money.”
As to why the U.S. took so long to declare a health emergency — HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra cited “evolving circumstances” for the declaration — experts say there are a few reasons.
One is to avoid further stigmatization of the LGBTQ community. So far, most cases in the U.S. have been reported among men who have sex with men, a group that includes people who identify as gay, bisexual, transgender and nonbinary.
Even though the CDC has said there is no evidence that monkeypox is a sexually transmitted infection and that anyone can contract the disease, Halkitis said health officials may have been worried about further discrimination of LGBTQ people.
“The other reason I think there’s a hesitation is because I think people are exhausted with COVID,” he said. “And the last thing people want to hear about is another public health emergency when we don’t even have the last one under control.”
ABC News’ Devin Dwyer, Cheyenne Haslett and Karen Travers contributed to this report.
(NEW YORK) — An adult at an Illinois day care center has tested positive for monkeypox, and a number of children may have been exposed to the virus, health officials in Illinois announced on Friday.
At this time, officials did not disclose the number of children that may have been exposed to the virus. Screening of children and staff from the day care, which is located in the Rantoul area of Illinois, near Champaign, is currently underway, and no additional cases have been discovered as of yet.
“All available state, local and federal resources are being deployed to assist families,” state officials said during a press conference on Friday afternoon. “Pediatricians are on site, as we speak, to screen children for cases and they’re mobile testing and vaccines for their families. Health officials will continue to stay in contact with families and provide information and resources in the coming days.”
The day care has been cleaned, and it is still open, officials said.
“The people who have been exposed, potentially, do not need to be in quarantine, so they are being screened and assessed. Anyone with even a tiny little suspicion, we will put them in isolation pending any type of results, but they have the guidance for cleaning and they have done that probably a lot more than is even necessary,” officials said.
The individual with monkeypox “also works in a home health care,” and health officials have been in contact with the one client who has been impacted.
“The person with monkeypox is in isolation, is being medically monitored, and is doing well,” officials added.
The disease is typically spread through prolonged skin-to-skin contact with infected people’s lesions or bodily fluids, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In addition to lesions, which can appear like pimples or blisters, the most common symptoms associated with monkeypox are swollen lymph nodes, fever, headache, fatigue and muscle aches.
Officials reported that Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker had been in touch with the White House, and at the state’s request, “the Food and Drug Administration has authorized use of the vaccine for anyone under 18, without jumping through the normal hoops in this process.”
“That means that anyone with their guardian’s approval will be vaccinated today,” officials said.
ABC News has reached out to the FDA and the White House for clarity on whether a formal authorization has been made for children to receive the JYNNEOS vaccine.
On Tuesday, the FDA confirmed to ABC News that “numerous” children have been granted access through a special permission process that operates on a case-by-case basis.
If a doctor decides a person under 18 was exposed to monkeypox and the benefit of the vaccine is greater than any potential risk, they can submit a request to the FDA. In a statement, the FDA said numerous such requests have been granted, but did not say exactly how many.
At this time, the majority of monkeypox cases confirmed domestically and globally in the current outbreak have been detected in gay, bisexual or other men who have sex with men. However, health officials have repeatedly stressed that the virus does not discriminate, and anyone exposed to monkeypox can contract the virus.
At least five children in the U.S. have now positive for monkeypox, according to state and local officials from across the country.
On Thursday, the Biden administration declared the current monkeypox outbreak to be a public health emergency in the U.S.
Globally, more than 28,000 cases of monkeypox have been confirmed across 88 countries, including 7,500 cases reported domestically.
(NEW YORK) — Following its emergency authorization last month, just 7,300 doses of Novavax’s COVID-19 vaccine have been administered to Americans across the country, newly updated data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reveals.
According to John Brownstein, Ph.D., an epidemiologist at Boston Children’s Hospital and an ABC News contributor, the sluggish start may be, in part, due to the fact that the vaccines were not immediately made available after authorization, and thus, there could be some reporting delays
The total Novavax doses represent just a fraction of the shots put into arms each day, though the overall number of vaccines administered has plummeted in recent months.
In addition, the vaccine has not been widely available, with just 385 sites initially offering the Novavax vaccine out of the more than 53,000 locations with COVID-19 vaccines, Brownstein said. However, in recent days, that number has jumped to 986 sites, which Brownstein suggested may help boost uptake.
“A mix of lower access, limited promotion and a slowing of the vaccination campaign means that Novavax has not been of high priority for remaining unvaccinated Americans,” Brownstein said. “As supply increases, we could see increased access but it’s unlikely to make a real dent.”
In July, the Biden administration secured 3.2 million doses of Novavax’s COVID-19 vaccine, in hopes that some unvaccinated Americans would get the shot.
A number of health experts had expressed their hope that some of the individuals, who are still hesitant to be vaccinated, would be more inclined to get the Novavax vaccine, because it is based on a more traditional protein-based technology, one already used for the flu vaccine and other shots, while Pfizer and Moderna vaccine platforms tapped a new genetic technology — with messenger RNA — to produce their vaccines.
“A more traditional delivery route has to be seen as incentive to convince those that have yet to roll up their sleeves,” Brownstein explained.
However, early indicators suggest that the authorization has yet to substantially move the needle with the most hesitant Americans.
Even so, health experts previously told ABC News that no matter how widespread the use of Novavax’s vaccine is, it will still save lives.
Nationally, there are still more than 26 million American adults who remain completely unvaccinated.
There has not been a significant bump in the number of people receiving a first COVID-19 dose since November 2021. Since then, the average number has steadily fallen to around 50,000 first shots, administered across all eligible age groups, each day.
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(NEW YORK) — With over 6,000 cases of monkeypox confirmed in the United States, including five children, the demand for the monkeypox vaccine is high.
And while the current vaccine, JYNNEOS, is approved only for adults ages 18 and older, it has been administered to children in the U.S. on a case-by-case basis, according to the Food and Drug Administration.
The FDA confirmed to ABC News that “numerous” children have been granted access to the vaccine through a special permission process.
If a doctor decides a person under 18 was exposed to monkeypox and the benefit of the vaccine is greater than any potential risk, they can submit a request to the FDA. Only children with direct exposure are granted access, and even then access is decided on a case-by-case basis
The FDA declined to state exactly how many children have received the vaccine to date through this special permission process.
The JYNNEOS vaccine, delivered in a two-dose regimen, has not been tested through clinical trials in children.
There have been no “adverse events to date” in delivering the vaccine to children in the U.S., and similar vaccines have been tested in children without serious safety concerns, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“JYNNEOS contains a non-replicating Vaccinia virus. While JYNNEOS has not been studied specifically for children or adolescents, the same non-replicating Vaccinia virus in the JYNNEOS vaccine has been used in studies as part of vaccines against other diseases including tuberculosis, measles, and Ebola,” the CDC said in a statement. “These studies included children as young as 5 months old, and no serious safety concerns were reported.”
Given the case-by-case basis of administering the monkeypox vaccine, there is no availability for mass vaccination of children at this time.
Children under the age of 8 are among those the CDC considers at “increased risk” for developing more severe illness if infected with monkeypox, along with pregnant people, people who are immunocompromised and those who have a history of atopic dermatitis or eczema.
Experts are not sure why children are at increased risk for severe illness, but it may be due to their immune systems and the fact that “younger children are sometimes more susceptible to some viral infections,” Dr. Richard Malley, senior physician in pediatrics, division of infectious diseases, at Boston Children’s Hospital and a professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, told ABC News.
Monkeypox, also known as MPX, is spread primarily through direct, skin-to-skin contact between someone who has the virus and someone who does not, according to the CDC.
Typically, the disease begins with a fever, headache, fatigue, chills and muscle aches. The disease is similar to smallpox, however, monkeypox also causes swollen lymph nodes.
Within one to three days of initial symptoms, those infected typically develop a rash either on their face or other parts of the body, according to the CDC.
Per the World Health Organization, the lesions — or rash — start out as dark spots on the skin before progressing to bumps that fill with fluid.
Antiviral medications such as Tecovirimat, which is available for children, are currently being used for treatment of monkeypox.
Officials in the U.S. and around the world have expressed concern that there are not enough monkeypox vaccines to address the emerging crisis. With demand increasing, U.S. health officials have reported that 1.1 million doses of the JYNNEOS vaccine will be allocated to states and jurisdictions across the country.
Moderna, the maker of a COVID-19 vaccine, said Wednesday they have initiated a research program to consider whether the company could create a monkeypox vaccine with mRNA technology.
Any new vaccine would still need to go through the regulatory authorization process, which can take weeks to months, even in special circumstances.
Now that the Biden administration has declared the current monkeypox outbreak a public health emergency, the FDA could move to issue an emergency use authorization for the JYNNEOS vaccine for children under 18.
The FDA told ABC News it would still need to go through a process to evaluate if it would want to authorize the vaccine for a younger population.
ABC News’ Eric Strauss, Arielle Mitropoulos and Ivan Pereira contributed to this report.
(NEW YORK) — With the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services declaring the monkeypox outbreak a public health emergency as the number of cases continue to rise, the most important thing you can do is know your risk level. Monkeypox is still rare and most people have a low risk.
But if you are in a city where monkeypox is spreading, and in a community where it’s spreading, you are at higher risk in this current phase of the outbreak.
The monkeypox outbreak first started spreading among men who have sex with men, a group that includes people who identify as gay, bisexual, transgender and nonbinary. The group continues to be at the highest risk. So far, the bulk of cases have been reported in large cities like New York and Los Angeles.
As the outbreak continues, the virus may soon start to spread further and begin to affect different demographic groups.
Experts interviewed by ABC News provided the latest on how to stay safe. Alongside these suggestions, the experts reiterated that at this time, the risk of transmission to the general population is low. But they agreed everyone should be aware of current outbreak and take steps to reduce risk.
Be alert: Avoid close or skin-to-skin contact with those who may have the virus
Direct, close, skin-to-skin contact “is considered to be the main route of transmission, which can occur in a variety of ways. It can occur just by day-to-day contact with a case of monkeypox, in close proximity, or can occur through intimate contact, as well as during sexual contact,” said Dr. Wafaa El-Sadr, a professor of epidemiology and medicine at Columbia University.
Because monkeypox can spread during sexual intimacy, it’s important to “be honest and forthcoming with your intimate partners” about risks and possible prior exposures, said Richard Silvera, professor of medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
The CDC says monkeypox is contagious from the start of symptoms until the rash has healed. Two to four weeks is the typical length of illness.
“You can have a rash in multiple areas of the body, and that rash can look like many things. It can look like a pimple, it can look like a little bump that mimics folliculitis which is when the follicle of the hair gets infected, can be painless or painful,” said Dr. Robert Pitts, an infectious disease doctor at NYU Langone Health.
Don’t share: Avoid sharing towels, clothing and bed linens
The virus can spread through contaminated objects including “clothing, bed sheets, towels, and other porous materials,” says Dr. Anne Rimoin, professor of epidemiology at the University of California, Los Angeles.
While this form of transmission is not nearly as common as skin-to-skin contact, it is something to keep in mind when sharing items with others.
“This virus could live on those surfaces for a period of time and then spread to another person,” Rimoin said.
The CDC also recommends avoiding utensils or cups used by someone with monkeypox.
General hygiene: Wash hands with soap and water or use an alcohol-based hand sanitizer
“Hand hygiene is the most important thing, not just for monkeypox but for any infectious disease,” says ABC News chief medical correspondent Dr. Jennifer Ashton.
With hands being the vectors between all that we touch and where germs can enter– eyes, nose, mouth — hand hygiene is vital to staying healthy. Practices that have worked for the past two years, still work.
“Mask wearing, hand washing…if it works for COVID it’ll work for monkeypox as well,” says Silvera
Cover up: Being fully clothed may be safer, especially when encountering large crowds
To reduce the likelihood of skin-to-skin contact with someone who may be infected with the virus, wear clothing that covers your body.
The CDC says “festivals, events, and concerts where attendees are fully clothed and unlikely to share skin-to-skin contact are safer,” when compared to similar events with minimal clothing and close contact.
“These are not events where transmission is likely occurring, but of course, if you feel like you’re in a high risk category, you may want to exercise a little bit more caution,” says. Dr. John Brownstein, an ABC News contributor and chief innovation officer at Boston Children’s Hospital.
Disinfect: Wipe down surfaces that may be contaminated
Monkeypox is considered an orthopoxvirus, which are sensitive to many disinfectants, according to the CDC. They recommend disinfecting areas where someone with monkeypox has spent time, and for objects they may have used.
“At the same time, it’s not like people will need to go back to those old COVID days where there was a lot of confusion and wiping down of groceries and disinfecting household items where there’s literally no chance of any risk,” says Brownstein.
For those specifically in areas of high transmission, or are encountering surfaces or objects used by someone with monkeypox, disinfecting may provide additional protection.
The CDC recommends using an EPA registered disinfectant.
If eligible, get vaccinated: Reach out to a local health department
The CDC currently recommends that vaccines should be administered to those at risk of developing monkeypox. This includes those that have been exposed to monkeypox as well as people who are aware that one of their sexual partners in the past two weeks has been diagnosed or people with multiple sexual partners in the past two weeks living in an area with known monkeypox. People should stay up-to-date with their local health department to determine eligibility requirements.
“If we had a lot more [vaccine] supply, we might consider vaccination of groups that have very dense social networks, like college colleges, students, prisons, living situations that would potentially allow for multiple contacts where there could be risk,” says Brownstein.
Stay current: Be on the lookout for new information as it comes
“We’re all going to have to kind of pitch it together and kind of figure this out as we go,” said Silvera.
Even researchers and clinicians are learning more every day.
“I studied about [monkeypox] as an infectious disease physician, but just in May, I started to see and interact with monkeypox patients. So this has been a steep learning curve for me,” said Pitts.
Before now, the number of monkeypox cases has been relatively low. We will continue to learn more about the virus as time goes on and the guidance from experts will evolve as a result. But experts emphasize that remaining calm is important.
“This is quite different from the Coronavirus in so many ways and therefore I think people should be aware, concerned, but at the same time should not really panic,” said El-Sadr.
