“We get concerned when we see a virus doing things that we don’t normally see it doing,” Rimoin says. This outbreak looks very different, says Anne Rimoin, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has long studied monkeypox in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Monkeypox is endemic in West and Central Africa, and the virus occasionally causes outbreaks elsewhere in the world, but most are quickly contained or peter out by themselves. A disproportionate number of cases are in men who have sex with men (MSM), an unusual twist given that researchers have never convincingly shown sexual transmission occurs in monkeypox. As of 26 May, two dozen countries in the Americas, Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and Australia had reported more than 350 suspected and confirmed cases of the disease, a much milder cousin of smallpox, the deadly scourge that the World Health Organization (WHO) deemed eradicated in 1980.
With the COVID-19 pandemic still raging, a second public health threat has the world on high alert: a global outbreak of monkeypox. Update, 26 May, 10:20 a.m.: This story has been updated with the latest on the outbreak.
