Monkeypox - Another Ill Wind

Monkeypox

- Sonali Acharjee

SORE SIGHT

Rashes and blisters in patients infected with monkeypox

Even as the world is getting used to the idea of learning to live with Covid, another virus seems to be doing the rounds outside of the continent it was first identified in-Africa. As on May 24, the World Health Organization had confirmed 92 cases of monkeypox in 12 countries where the virus has not been endemic (regularly found).

A cousin of smallpox (both belong to the orthopoxvirus genus), the disease was first seen in research monkeys in 1958, hence the name monkeypox. It was first identified in humans in 1970 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in a nine-year-old boy in a region where smallpox had been eradicated in 1968. A viral zoonosis (transmitted to humans from animals), it has symptoms similar to smallpox, but is clinically less severe. Endemic to only 11 countries in Africa, the recent outbreak elsewhere in the world has taken experts by surprise because there is no history of travel between the countries where the cases have occurred this week and the regions where the disease is endemic. There were cases of the virus in the US in 2003, as a result of the import of infected animals from Africa, says Dr Vikas Deswal, an internal medicine specialist at MedantaThe Medicity in Gurgaon. But the cause of the spread this time has not yet been determined.