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The Mystery of Monkeypox?s Global Spread


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the UK Health Security Agency
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Kraemer—
the University of Oxford
the Monkeypox Tracker
the Institute of Tropical Medicine
the Yale School of Public Health
University of California
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Emory University
Omicron
Covid-19
Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health
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Moritz Kraemer
John Brownstein
Mateo Prochazka
Jo Walker
Jamie Lloyd-Smith
Boghuma Titanji
Bill Hanage
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Congo Basin


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Portugal
Spain
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the Democratic Republic of the Congo
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Positivity     41.00%   
   Negativity   59.00%
The New York Times
SOURCE: https://www.wired.com/story/mystery-monkeypox-global-spread
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Summary

Another sequence from a Portuguese patient also appears similar to the forms of the virus detected in 2018.“If virus genomes from this outbreak are very similar to earlier ones, we’d feel more confident that there hasn’t been some evolution-driven jump in transmissibility,” says Jo Walker, a researcher at the Yale School of Public Health.It seems more likely that this outbreak has stemmed from a flare in cases within parts of Africa, combined with a spike in air travel following the end of pandemic restrictions, and waning immunity against orthopoxviruses—the viral family that contains monkeypox, cowpox, smallpox, and others—across large swathes of the planet. “Sexual transmission is always a possible mode of spread for any pathogen which spreads by close physical contact.” However, as new cases emerge and viruses are isolated and sequenced, it will become more possible to piece together transmission networks, Titanji says, and it may give us additional clues as to exactly how the virus spreads.But while the news of an infectious disease that appears to be spreading around the world has prompted concern in the wake of Covid-19, there is far less reason to be fearful. Hanage points out that the World Health Organization’s poxvirus team amounts to just a handful of staff, while Titanji says that when researchers in Cameroon tried to publish a paper based on a 2018 outbreak, their attempts were rejected.She feels that while the current outbreak is containable, it illustrates how vital it is to keep monitoring for future monkeypox virus strains that may evolve to become more transmissible and capable of causing a major crisis.“There is still a lot we can learn about this virus,” she says.

As said here by Wired