What to Know About the Monkeypox Drug TPOXX —And Why It ’ s So Hard to Get

Monkeypox, which federal officials declared a public health emergency on August 4, is not as contagious as the other ongoing public health emergency in the U.S.: COVID-19. Monkeypox primarily spreads through contact with infected skin lesions. Theoretically, containing monkeypox should therefore be more feasible, as long as testing, vaccines, and treatments are accessible. But in reality, the rollouts of all three approaches have faced major challenges. Getting the antiviral drug tecovirimat, also known as TPOXX, is particularly difficult. Here’s what to know about the antiviral drug treatment TPOXX. What is TPOXX? TPOXX is approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to treat smallpox, which belongs to the same family of orthopox viruses as monkeypox. It likely helps people with monkeypox as well. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] TPOXX was approved for smallpox under a special regulatory process called the Animal Rule, which allows the FDA to approve a drug without first testing it in people. Because smallpox is such a dangerous and highly contagious virus, and is eradicated from the world, it wasn’t possible to test the drug in people and was instead tested in animals. Even in animals, researchers used not the variola smallpox virus but the related monkeypox virus as a stand-in, since only two labs in the world—one at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and one in Russia—have samples of the smallpox virus and c...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized healthscienceclimate monkeypox Source Type: news