Author:

Monkeypox, a disease that rarely shows up outside a belt of countries across Central and West Africa, has exploded into the news recently, with cases reported in the United Kingdom, Spain, Portugal, the United States, Sweden, Italy, and likely Canada. At this point, the cases are mainly being detected by clinics that treat sexually transmitted diseases and are being seen in men who have sex with men. But the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have cautioned that to assume the virus is only circulating in a single subset of the population risks missing cases that may be occurring among other people. Monkeypox causes a flu-like array of symptoms, but also comes with a distinctive rash; one telltale sign is the fact that lesions often appear on the p...

Enlarge / A 2003 photo of the arms and legs of a 4-year-old girl infected with monkeypox in Liberia. A growing outbreak of monkeypox cases has spread across several countries, including the US, suggesting that the animal-transmitted disease that occurs in forested areas of Central and West Africa has been quietly spreading undetected. So far, the US has reported one case in a Massachusetts man who had recently traveled to Canada, which, as of Thursday, reported 17 suspected cases in Montreal. The United Kingdom has identified nine cases, one of which is connected to recent travel to Nigeria, where monkeypox is endemic. But the other cases appear to have been infected within the UK and are all not linked to the travel-related case by contact or ...

LONDON (AP) — European and American health authorities have identified a number of monkeypox cases in recent days, mostly in young men. It’s a surprising outbreak of disease that rarely appears outside Africa. Health officials around the world are keeping watch for more cases because, for the first time, the disease appears to be spreading among people who didn’t travel to Africa. They stress, however, that the risk to the general population is low. WHAT IS MONKEYPOX? Monkeypox is a virus that originates in wild animals like rodents and primates, and occasionally jumps to people. Most human cases have been in central and west Africa, where the disease is endemic. The illness was first identified by scientists in 1958 when there were two outbreaks of a “pox-like” disease in research monke...