Monkeypox: What to know about the virus detected in the United States
Monkeypox is not known to spread easily between humans. The fact that cases are emerging in several countries at once — with signs of “sustained” transmission in people — is striking, said Aris Katzourakis, a professor of evolution and genomics at the University of Oxford.
“It’s either a lot of bad luck or something quite unusual happening here,” Katzourakis said.
Monkeypox is named for the animals in which it was discovered. The disease cropped up in 1958 among monkeys kept for research, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — more than a decade before a human case was identified in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Mass vaccination against smallpox “presumably” curbed monkeypox infections for a time among humans, researchers wrote in a 2005 article. But cases resurged, thanks in part to a lack of immunity in later generations, they say. More than 450 cases have been reported in Nigeria since 2017, according to the CDC.
Monkeypox infections typically last two to four weeks, the CDC says, and begin with flu-like symptoms and swelling of the lymph nodes. Eventually fluid-filled bumps — or “pox” — spread across the skin.
The disease can spread through contact with animals, infected people and materials used by infected people, health authorities say. Examples listed by the CDC include contact with bodily fluids, contact with monkeypox sores and infection through “respiratory droplets” in a “close setting” such as a shared household.
Monkeypox can be deadly, but two major strains of the virus pose different risks. About 1 in 10 people infected with a Congo Basin strain have been found to die, according to the World Health Organization, while a West African strain appeared to be fatal for about 1 in 100 people infected.
That milder strain is the one infecting people who were hospitalized in the United Kingdom, health authorities said. It is not clear what strain the Massachusetts patient contracted.
How worried should we be? How does this compare to covid-19?
Experts stress that monkeypox is different from the coronavirus that upended the world.
Monkeypox is highly visible, making contact-tracing and isolation easier. An existing smallpox vaccine could help protect the public if needed, Katzourakis said. And “we don’t have the potential for something spreading through the globe at anything like the kind of rate that we saw with covid,” he said, because monkeypox transmits less easily between humans.
Still, the latest spate of cases stands out, Katzourakis said. The longer it continues, the more chance the virus has to mutate and improve its transmissibility, just as the novel coronavirus has.
Outbreaks of monkeypox have typically been small, with patients in the single digits, said Tom Inglesby, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “So I think the risk to the general public at this point, from the information we have, is very, very low.”
But he agreed the latest cases raise many questions. “We don’t really have the sense yet of what’s driving it. … There isn’t a travel link that’s identified that brings these cases all together,” he said.
Health officials have noted recent cases among men who have sex with other men — a pattern that is crucial to understand, Inglesby said, as officials have not previously considered sexual orientation to be a risk factor for monkeypox.
Has monkeypox made it to the United States before?
Monkeypox made its way to the United States — and the Western Hemisphere — for the first time in 2003, researchers say. More than 70 cases were reported in the Midwest, mostly among people who were exposed to prairie dogs apparently infected by rodents from Ghana, according to the CDC.
Two children fell seriously ill and recovered, the CDC said.
The infection reported Wednesday in Massachusetts is the first case of monkeypox identified in the United States this year, health officials said. Texas and Maryland reported one infection each last year in “people with recent travel to Nigeria,” the Massachusetts Department of Public Health said.
Where else has…
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