The appearance of several cases of monkeypox in different parts of Europe and America, when the world is still suffering from the coronavirus pandemic, raises several unknowns and one question: should health authorities be concerned?
Is there a background?
The infection, caused by an orthopoxvirus of the smallpox family, the first disease eradicated by humans thanks to vaccines, was detected in 1970 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
In this African country and in others such as the Central African Republic or Nigeria, monkeypox is endemic.
The first outbreak outside this continent was reported in 2003 in the United States.
Later, in 2018, in the context of a large outbreak in Nigeria, two travelers from the United Kingdom, one from Israel and one from Singapore, coming from that country, were diagnosed with the virus, according to the European Center for Prevention and Disease Control.
In the UK, a health worker treating one of the cases also tested positive.
Until now, the documented infections occurred in similar contexts, infections imported from endemic countries.
Those registered these weeks, however, represent an unprecedented outbreak in the West, with cases at least in the United Kingdom, Spain, Italy, Sweden, the United States and Canada.
"They are not all connected to each other," says Óscar Zurriaga, vice president of the Spanish Society of Epidemiology, in this video.
“So if they're not connected to each other and they don't have a travel history, at some point it's failing us in the chain of transmission.
We'll probably know more in a few weeks."
This reinforces the idea that the virus was already circulating before the first case detected by the United Kingdom on May 7: “It is a very rare disease that, if you do not suspect it, it is impossible to diagnose.
Monkeypox PCR is not done on people.
There has to be a clinical suspicion,” says Carlos Chaccour, a medical researcher at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health and the University of Navarra.
You can find these and other data in the video that accompanies the news.
