Monkeypox

Monkeypox

• Monkeypox was first report­ed in 1958 in laboratory mon­keys and the first human case was reported in 1970 in a nine ­month­ old baby in the Democratic Republic of Con­go.
• Nigeria reported its first case of monkeypox in hu­mans in 1970 when one case was detected; there were two human cases of monkeypox in Nigeria in 1978.
• And after nearly four decades of not reporting any cases, monkeypox (West African clade) made a re-emergence in Nigeria in September 2017 with a total of 558 cases reported till now.

Spread:

• Based on epidemiological and clinical characteristics of 122 confirmed or probable cases of human monkeypox cases in Nigeria, researchers found both primary zoonotic and human­ to ­human trans­mission.
• Like all diseases that are endemic only to Africa, while efforts were made to prevent an outbreak in the non-­endemic countries out­side Africa, no serious inter­national attempts were made to stop the outbreak in Nige­ria nor study the virus characteristics.
• The current outbreak in Eu­rope and North America is the first instance when large­ scale human­ to­ human transmission has been re­ported outside Africa.
• There are no clear answ­ers to how humans are in­fected as the host animal that behaves as a reservoir for the virus has not been identified in the wild. And how the vi­rus spreads from animals to humans is not known.
• The current outbreak ap­pears to have spread prima­rily among men who have sex with men.
• The virus is not transmitted through se­men or vaginal fluids but the skin ­to ­skin contact during sex can result in virus spread.

Low mutation rate

• Till date over 15 monkeypox genomes have been se­quenced. But the monkey­pox virus has a lower muta­tion rate (about two mutations a year) compared to nearly 25 mutations in a year in the case of SARS­ CoV­2 virus.
• This is because monkeypox is a DNA virus unlike the SARS­CoV­2, which is an RNA virus.
• It is yet un­clear if the virus has acquired the ability of sustained trans­mission among humans.