Monkeypox virus outbreak

Monkeypox is an orthopoxvirus that causes disease, typically transmitted to humans from animals, a spokesperson for the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) ...

In Portugal, five cases of monkeypox have been found, with 15 more people being tested. The U.K. announced on Monday that they have detected four more cases of monkeypox, bringing the country’s total up to seven cases. As the situation evolves we will continue to keep Canadians informed.” The World Health Organization estimates there are thousands of monkeypox infections in about a dozen African countries every year. Health officials in Spain are investigating after eight men started showing symptoms of the viral infection. There is no cure for the virus, but most people recover from a monkeypox infection within a few weeks. Presumably they resulted from travel, but many of these cases have no travel history,” she said. “It’s also fair to say that we don’t know too much about this. Urgent investigations of the new cases are important as “they could suggest a novel means of spread or a change in the virus, but this is all to be determined,” she said. No confirmed cases of monkeypox have been reported to PHAC as of Thursday morning, the agency told Global News. However, 17 suspected cases of the virus are under investigation in Montreal. However, with the monkeypox cases we’re seeing now, there doesn’t appear to be a connection with rodents, with multiple cases being reported in Europe and North America, Rasmussen said. Recent cases of the monkeypox have researchers in Canada and elsewhere in the world trying to figure out just how widespread the virus is.

Cases of monkeypox, a virus typically confined to West and Central Africa, have recently turned up in several countries, including the U.K., Spain, ...

While acknowledging that the outbreak is unusual, experts stressed that any risk to the public is low, given monkeypox’s relatively low rate of contagiousness. Since then, eight more cases have been confirmed in the U.K., all of them among people who had no obvious connection to the first one. In the U.K., the first case was confirmed on May 7 in a man who had been in Nigeria and had developed a rash before returning. One strain of monkeypox is highly deadly, with a fatality rate of about 10 percent; another strain, which is the one detected in the U.K., causes death in less than 1 percent of cases. Health authorities said he was in “good condition” and “poses no risk to the public.” In 2003, a Midwest outbreak tied to travel in Ghana affected more than 70 people, though only two fell seriously ill and no one died.

The virus behind monkeypox is a close relative of the one that caused smallpox but is less deadly and less transmissible, causing symptoms that include fever ...

The oft-cited fatality rate of about 10 percent applies to a strain that infected people in the Congo Basin. The West African strain, which several of the current cases have been linked to, has a fatality rate closer to 1 percent—and that’s in poor, rural populations. And as another bioterrorism precaution, stockpiles of three smallpox vaccines are large enough “to vaccinate basically everyone in the U.S.” Inglesby said. It’s urgent to identify people early, get them treatment, and identify contacts.” It helps that one common symptom is an obvious rash, which looks like an extreme version of chickenpox. As for the U.S., “there are currently no additional suspected cases” beyond the individual in Massachusetts, McCollum told me. Are they the work of a new and more transmissible strain of monkeypox? A 2012 study suggested that the virus can persist in aerosols for several days—but that was under artificial laboratory conditions, and persistence is just one small part of the infection process. For decades, a few scientists have voiced concerns that the monkeypox virus could have become better at infecting people—ironically because we eradicated its relative, smallpox, in the late 1970s. “I’ve seen a lot of people writing as if everything we know about monkeypox is definitive and finalized, but the reality is that it is still a rare zoonotic infection,” she said. “I don’t think people should be freaking out at this stage,” Carl Bergstrom of the University of Washington told me, “but I don’t trust my own gut feelings anymore, because I’m so sick of all this shit that I tend to be optimistic.” Then again, Marr is less certain about monkeypox than she was about COVID. And Titanji notes that our knowledge of monkeypox is based on just 1,500 or so recorded cases, as of 2018. Rarely, monkeypox makes it to other continents, and when it does, outbreaks “are so small, they’re measured in single digits,” Thomas Inglesby, the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told me. This suggests that the monkeypox virus may be surreptitiously spreading from person to person, with some number of undetected cases.