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Macaque: If you don't have close contact with small monkeys and live outside of Africa, you hardly need to fear monkeypox.
Photo: Buddhika Weerasinghe/ Getty Images
A traveler who was recently in Nigeria was diagnosed with the monkeypox virus in the UK.
The disease is notifiable and so rare that the diagnosis has now become public.
Health authorities in the United Kingdom reassure the health authorities that the risk of someone being infected by the person concerned is very low.
The Robert Koch Institute has detailed information on the disease ready.
Monkeypox is usually contracted by consuming so-called "bushmeat" - the meat of African wild animals - or by close contact with primates, rodents, African wild squirrels or, in very rare cases, infected people.
Monkeypox thus has the potential to become zoonotic, i.e. a disease that spreads from an animal to humans.
However, the course of the disease is significantly milder than that of human smallpox.
Children are mostly affected, which is probably due to the main route of transmission: Most of the infected people in Africa probably contract the virus while playing with rodents or small monkeys.
The mortality rate is around two percent, and children are usually affected.
Deaths of those affected who were older than eight years are not known.
Patients with symptoms are themselves contagious.
Smallpox vaccination also protects against monkeypox
However, epidemics or pandemics are not to be feared: All human diseases, such as those that first appeared in 1960, progressed as individual cases without further spread.
The last isolated cases of monkeypox in the UK were in 2018 and 2021.
more on the subject
Epidemic in the Eifel: The attack of the dangerous smallpox by Steffen Kopetzky
Monkeypox is one of several smallpox diseases that have also accompanied mankind for many thousands of years.
Although they are rarely fatal, they are associated with the risk of total blindness.
There is no specific treatment against it, but there is a vaccination: Older people who have been vaccinated against smallpox (also: "pox") are immune to the disease, because the smallpox vaccination also protects against monkeypox.
Smallpox has been a scourge of humanity for thousands of years, wiping out entire populations.
They last performed in Germany in the 1960s and early 1970s;
In 1979, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the disease eradicated.
Those who were born later were therefore no longer vaccinated against it.
pat/Reuters