Public health officials and scientists are scrambling to understand how to stop the spread of monkeypox—and they are paying new attention to Africa’s long experience with the disease.
As monkeypox stokes here-we-go-again fears in a pandemic-weary world, some researchers in Africa are having their own sense of déjà vu. Another neglected tropical disease of the poor gets attention only after it starts to infect people in wealthy countries. “It’s as if your neighbor’s house is burning and you just close your window and say it’s fine,” says Yap Boum, an epidemiologist in Cameroon who works with both the health ministry and Doctors Without Borders.
“We are interdependent,” Boum notes. “What is happening in Africa will definitely impact what is happening in the West and vice versa.” The virus got its name after it was first identified in a colony of Asian monkeys in a Copenhagen, Denmark, laboratory in 1958, but it has only been isolated from a wild monkey—in Africa—once. It appears to be more common in squirrel, rat, and shrew species, occasionally spilling over into the human population, where it spreads mainly through close contact, but not through breathing. Isolating infected people typically helps outbreaks end quickly.
Mbala says demographic shifts have fueled the rise as well. “People are more and more moving to the forest to find food and to build houses, and this increases the contact between the wildlife and the population,” he says. Studies in the CAR showed cases spike after villagers move into the forest during the rainy season to collect caterpillars that are sold for food.
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