POX RETURNS

Monkeypox spreads to new geographies as the world experiences its worst ever outbreak of the zoonotic disease

- TARAN DEOL AND SEEMA PRASAD

HUMANS DREAD the family of poxviruses. One of its Members smallpox killed over 300 million in just eight decades before being eliminated in 1977. So, when one of its cousins the milder monkeypox virus infected a person in the UK on May 6, 2022, the world took note of it.

Human cases of monkeypox are considered rare outside Africa, and only eight cases had been reported in non-endemic areas till the start of 2022. This trend changed in May. In less than one month after the UK case was confirmed, 34 countries across Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, South America and North America reported 824 confirmed and 1,408 suspected cases of monkeypox virus infection.

Even India, which has never reported monkeypox cases, has rolled out an extensive surveillance in response to the current outbreak. The World Health Organization (WHO) has classified the public health risk of the current outbreak as "moderate" citing its concurrent outbreaks in geographical areas without known epidemiological links to endemic countries in west or central Africa. By far, this is the most geographically widespread outbreak of the virus in 50 years. On June 1, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general, WHO, said that the sudden appearance of monkeypox in multiple countries across the world indicates that the virus has been spreading undetected for some time. "It is unclear how long the virus has been spreading undetected outside Africa," says Rosamund Lewis, monkeypox technical lead for WHO. "We don't really know whether it's too late to contain."