First elements on European patients.
A study, published this Saturday in the Lancet Infectious Diseases, shows that the first British patients with monkeypox, which has been spreading around the world since the spring, presented symptoms different from those usually spotted in African countries.
While a fever attack was considered almost systematic, just over half of the patients studied in the United Kingdom had one.
For those who had bouts of fever, they were much shorter and required far fewer hospitalizations.
As for the typical lesions of the disease, they are most often concentrated around the genitals.
In the previous cases, they were generally larger, reaching for example the face or the nape of the neck.
For the authors of the study, this specificity suggests that the first British cases were contaminated by contact during sexual relations.
This hypothesis, to be clearly distinguished from the idea that the disease has become sexually transmitted, corresponds to the well-established notion that contamination is possible by touching a skin lesion in another patient.
More broadly, the authors of the study consider that their observations plead to broaden the definition of the disease in order to better detect new cases, without for example insisting so much on a fever.
No major genetic modification of the virus
However, these different symptoms do not mean that the current epidemic is due to a new version of the virus, as other researchers point out.
"There is no major genetic modification" in the viruses sequenced in current patients, noted pulmonologist Hugh Adler to AFP.
He argues that in Africa, many cases, without fever or with limited lesions, may have gone undetected, biasing comparisons.
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Carried out on about fifty patients, this work, still limited, is one of the first to characterize the clinical specificities of the current epidemic of monkeypox.
Until now, this disease was limited to ten African countries.
But, for several months, more than 4,000 cases have been recorded in Europe and on the American continent, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
The United Kingdom is one of the first countries where cases have been reported this year, hence the interest of this work based on observations made at the end of May, when only a hundred British patients had been registered.
The sample therefore corresponds to more than half of the known patients in the country at the time.
