Monkeypox

We have not yet emerged from the covida-19 pandemic, and a new contagious disease has already emerged - monkeypox.

The disease, known for decades, endemic in Central and West Africa where people are mostly infected in contact with infected wild animals, and most often fatalities are recorded among children, has spread throughout Europe since the beginning of May, but also to Canada, USA, Australia ... scientists believe that smallpox is not a significant public health problem, especially not compared to covid-19, the disease has become the subject of very heated debates.

African scientists have been warning for years that more and more patients are being infected with monkeypox every year.

The first case of monkeypox was reported on May 7 in the UK in a person residing in Nigeria, but scientists are increasingly convinced that the disease "under the radar" has spread to Europe before.

As cases of monkeypox have been rare in Europe so far, few scientists in the West have dealt with the disease, which is endemic in Central and West Africa where people mostly get sick after contact with an infected animal. But African scientists have been warning for years that more and more patients are being infected with monkeypox every year. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the first human cases of monkeypox were reported in 1972, 2,800 suspected cases were reported in 2018, 3,800 in 2019 and 6,300 in 2020, including 229 with a fatal outcome.

One of the reasons for the spread is related to the weakening of the collective immunity provided by the mass vaccination against smallpox, a similar but much more contagious and deadly disease than monkeypox. Thanks to a decades-long program of mass vaccination against smallpox, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the disease eradicated in 1980. As the smallpox vaccine is effective against smallpox, it has long provided protection to the population of Central and West African countries.

Scientists warn that due to the developed air traffic, a traveler from a country where monkeypox is an endemic disease, such as Nigeria, Cameroon or Congo, can transmit the infection anywhere in the world in less than 24 hours. This is exactly what happened: the first analyzed genome of monkeypox isolated in a patient in Portugal, published on May 19, showed that the strain of the virus that is now spreading is most similar to that transmitted by travelers from Nigeria to Singapore, Israel and Israel in 2018 and 2019. Great Britain. By the way, the strain of monkeypox virus from Nigeria is mild and rarely deadly, unlike the strain from Congo, whose mortality rate can be as high as 10 percent.