This outbreak is the first to spread in the community outside of Africa, with all previous cases associated with travel to regions where the virus is endemic or with imported animals harboring the virus. The largest number of confirmed cases is in the UK, where health protection teams are isolating people who test positive and their closest contacts and offering smallpox vaccines, which are cross-protective against monkeypox. . A substantial proportion of cases are among men who have sex with men (MSM).
As efforts to contain the outbreak continue, scientists are investigating how the disease came to break out in so many countries in such a short time. Many suspect that monkeypox was circulating at low levels, undetected, in the UK or Europe for several years before it reached the MSM community and broke out.
Professor David Heymann, who chairs a World Health Organization think tank on infectious threats to global health, said the virus may have entered the UK two or three years ago and spread undetected. . Between 2018 and 2019, four confirmed cases of monkeypox arrived in the UK, all recent travelers from Nigeria. Three more cases with a similar travel history arrived in 2021.
“It could be hypothetical that the transmission of the virus was amplified from this low level of transmission when it happened to enter the population that is currently amplifying transmission,” Heymann said, stressing that it was one of many hypotheses that needed more study before conclusions can be drawn. Genetic studies on monkeypox viruses taken from people in the ongoing outbreak show a strong resemblance to the virus that reached the UK, Israel and Singapore from Africa in 2018 and 2019. They also carry mutations that may have arisen when the virus was circulating at low levels.
While the UK’s first official case of 2022 arrived from Nigeria on May 4, the virus was already in the country, experts said. On May 14, the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) released pictures of monkeypox and doctors at sexual health clinics realized that some of their patients might have the disease as they had the same symptoms. symptom.
The patients tested negative for common infections, and doctors suspected a condition called disseminated gonococcal infection, before the patients tested positive for monkeypox.
“This may be a virus that has been circulating undetected for quite some time. They all have a common ancestor and that common ancestor probably dates back to 2019, although it’s too early to date it with any kind of precision,” said Professor Marc Van Ranst, a virologist at the University of Leuven in Belgium. It’s not clear if the mutations seen in the virus make the strain more transmissible to humans, but scientists say the virus evolved while infecting humans. And he added: “We know that chronic infection is not a plausible scenario, and that means there has been a chain of transmission events that have apparently gone unnoticed.”
Source: Ambito
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