When experiencing monkey pox disease, of course, you have to do treatment. The goal of treatment of monkey pox disease is to relieve the symptoms that appear and to improve quickly.
The monkeypox treatment is carried out in consultation with a specialist.
Monkeypox Treatment
Monkeypox treatment aims to relieve the symptoms that appear. The doctor will give paracetamol to relieve fever and pain, and ask the patient to rest to speed up the healing process.
During the treatment period, antiviral drugs and cidofovir may be given to patients with severe symptoms. Patients will also be given smallpox injections two weeks after exposure to monkey pox. Mechanical ventilation may also be necessary, but it is very rare.
Supportive care cannot stop the virus infection from taking place, but instead aims to increase the body’s resistance to fight infection.
In addition, patients are also recommended to consume a lot of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, low-fat milk, and grains, as energy intake in fighting infection.
Please note, 1 in 10 people with monkey pox is at risk of death. Therefore, patients need to be treated in isolation rooms to get monitoring from doctors and prevent the spread of the disease.
To date, there is no special treatment for monkey pox. This disease can heal on its own with resistance from the patient’s immune system.
Management of monkeypox
Specific management for monkey pox has not been established until now. The management provided is supportive therapy to overcome the complaints such as fever, headache, muscle pain, and dehydration. Some antivirals are used as monkey pox therapy, but still require further study.
Supportive Therapy
Most monkey pox patients have mild symptoms and will improve on their own (self-limiting) within 2-4 weeks. Supportive therapy with fluid administration, analgesic antipyretics, such as paracetamol can be done to relieve patient complaints such as fever, dehydration, headache, muscle aches, and others. Patients are advised to undergo bedrest, but generally do not require hospitalization unless symptoms are severe. [1,2]
Medicine
Specific medical therapy to monkeypox is not yet known with certainty. Some of the antiviral drugs studied for monkeypox therapy are cidofovir and tecovirimat.
Cidofovir
Cidofovir proved effective for dealing with monkey pox in in vitro studies conducted on experimental animals. However, human research data is not yet available and the provision of this therapy in humans is still controversial because of the nephrotoxic side effects caused.
Tecovirimat
The United States has used tecovirimat as one of the therapies for smallpox. The drug has been shown to be effective in protecting primates from severe monkeypox infections and is thought to be effective in humans. However, further studies are still needed. [3,4]
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References
- WHO. Monkeypox. 2019. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/monkeypox
- Graham MB. Monkeypox. Medscape. 2019. https://emedicine.medscape.com/article/1134714-overview#a6
- Baker RO, Bray M, Huggins JW. Potential antiviral therapeutics for smallpox, monkeypox and other orthopoxvirus infections. Antiviral Res. 2003;57:13-23.
- Grosenbach DW, Honeychurch K, Rose EA, et al. Oral tecovirimat for the treatment of smallpox. N Engl J Med. 2018;379(1):44-53.
