Case studies expose deadly risk of mpox in people with untreated HIV

In June 2022, a young man in his 30s severely sick with mpox, the viral disease formerly known as monkeypox, was admitted to the Salvador Zubirán National Institute of Health Sciences and Nutrition hospital in Mexico City. Tests showed the patient was also HIV-positive, which he had not known, and that his blood had few CD4 cells, critical immune cells that HIV attacks. The man’s immune system was so weak it could not keep mpox in check and painful lesions kept spreading across his body, eating away at, or necrotizing, the flesh, according to HIV researcher Brenda Crabtree Ramirez, who was on his care team. Then the virus spread to his lungs, too. “He just kept getting worse and worse and worse,” she says. With no treatments available, his doctors got the hospital’s ethics board to approve a desperate plan: They would transfer blood plasma from a colleague who had been vaccinated in the United States against mpox to the patient, in the hope that the antibodies from the donation might help fight his infection with the poxvirus. The experimental therapy failed—the man died 2 weeks later, one of the first deaths from the disease in Mexico. Although mpox cases have plummeted globally since then, the outbreak still simmers in Latin America and other locations. The World Health Organization (WHO) last week reaffirmed that the disease remains a global emergency. And a grim report today in The Lancet and being presented at a confer...
Source: ScienceNOW - Category: Science Source Type: news