(ANSA) - ROME, JUNE 03 - The cases of monkeypox found in Italy have all registered males and it is "plausible" that the transmission of the virus occurs by direct contact during sexual intercourse.
This is what emerges from the article published by the researchers of the National Institute for Infectious Diseases Lazzaro Spallanzani, in the yesterday issue of Eurosurveillance, the scientific journal of the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), and which describes the first cases of smallpox observed in Italy. of monkeys (Monkeypox) all in male persons.
The article represents, together with two other rapidcommunications by British and Portuguese researchers published in the same issue, the first detailed description of the disease, in the context of the outbreak that is affecting various European and non-European countries.
From the analysis of epidemiological and clinical data and from the study of the various biological samples in which the virus has been identified, the hypothesis of transmission by direct contact during sexual intercourse is considered plausible.
The same article also reports the description of the viral sequenzagenomics, complete with bioinformatic and phylogenetic analysis, of the first Italian Monkeypox virus.
The sequence, already registered on May 26 on the GeneBank website as the first sequence in Italy, demonstrates that the virus of Italian cases belongs to the West Africa clade,
similar to the virus identified by other European researchers in the current disease outbreak.
The Infectious Diseases Unit of the San Donato Hospital in Arezzo also collaborated in describing the cases.
(HANDLE).