It is unclear how some people recently diagnosed with the disease became infected with the monkeypox virus or how it is likely to spread
More new human cases of monkeypox have been identified worldwide, with dozens reported in the U.K. alone. The increase comes after previous evidence had suggested there was unknown transmission of the monkeypox virus within the country’s population, according to the U.K. Health Security Agency . Monkeypox is thought to originate in rodents in Central and West Africa, and it has repeatedly jumped to humans.
“This is an evolving story,” says Anne Rimoin, a professor of epidemiology at the University of California, Los Angeles’s Fielding School of Public Health.
The bigger issue, he says, is that the virus crossed over from animals—possibly rodents—in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria and western Africa. “If you look at some of our most troublesome infectious disease threats—whether [they are] Ebola or Nipah or coronaviruses like [those that cause] SARS and COVID-19 and now monkeypox—these are disproportionately zoonotic diseases, diseases transmitted from animals to humans,” Hotez adds.
It remains a mystery why more people in Africa are now contracting the virus. The factors that contributed to recent Ebola epidemics, which infected several thousand people in West Africa and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, may play a role. Experts suggest that factors such as population growth and more settlements near forests, as well as increasing interaction with potentially infected animals, favor the transmission of animal viruses to humans.
“Currently, there is no global system in place to manage the spread of Monkeypox,” said Nigerian virologist Oyewale Tomori in an interview published in the Conversation last year. But it is considered highly unlikely that the current outbreak will become an epidemic in the U.K. The risk to the population is so far low, according to UKHSA. Now the agency is looking for more cases and working with partners internationally to find out if there are similar clusters of monkeypox in other countries.
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