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Transcript:

My name is Diana Burgueno-Vega, I'm a general surgery surgeon at Lakeland Regional. I've been practicing for 11 years at Lakeland. My main areas are general surgery and I do surgical wound care, which are mostly very difficult-to-treat and atypical wounds, such as the one that I'm presenting today is a gentleman who was infected with monkeypox, went through the acute phase, and developed multiple lesions, including some that were in his face.

He was seen at three different hospitals, including our own facility, and nobody wanted to touch the wounds because of fear of infection. Now we know that getting infected from monkeypox after the patient has passed the acute phase is actually a very low risk. However, I like to share this experience because when the patient develops the kind of wounds that my patient developed, we still have to treat them like any other wound where we have to go in there, clean it, debride it, and treat it with topical treatments and anyone care that needs to be done.

At that point, two months after the infection, the patient was safe to handle unless you had an obvious open wound or you have the same risk that you have with any other wound that you're treating. So, taking the proper precautions to protect the provider and the nurses is the basic things that we need to do and the patient needs to be treated.