Because if so, that's new - that's not been seen before." One CDC monkeypox expert says the sexuality aspect is a red herringĮpidemiologist Andrea McCollum, with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has been dispatched to investigate monkeypox outbreaks for years, in at least four different African countries. "That's what makes us a bit suspicious that maybe this is transmitting sexually, and we need to find that out. "You could imagine that a female person living in the same house, sharing utensils and so on with somebody who's incubating it could get it, but we haven't seen that so far," Whitworth said.
The virus can be picked up on surfaces, from bedding, clothes, or respiratory excretions, but it's especially easy to get it through skin to skin contact. Typically, monkeypox spreads from person to person through extremely close contact. Professor Jimmy Whitworth, an infectious disease expert at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, told Insider that "we urgently need to find out" whether this version of monkeypox is spreading in a new way. Why some health officials are focusing on men who have sex with men For now, experts are divided on whether we should give much weight to the fact that most of the monkeypox patients diagnosed outside Africa recently have been men.
It's still early days for disease investigators, who are tracking down exactly how genetically related these monkeypox cases may be, and how they might be spreading from person to person.
This doesn't mean we are dealing with a new brand of monkeypox - one that only infects males, or one that is sexually transmitted between men who have sex with men. They haven't all traveled to countries where the disease is endemic, like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, or Cameroon, nor have they all been in contact with people who recently traveled to the parts of west and central Africa where animals like rodents harbor this virus.īut one thing that public health experts have noticed is that most of the infected patients - in fact all but one of the patients whose sex has been revealed so far - are men. One of the troubling things that disease experts have noticed with this outbreak is that the patients don't all have a clear link to one another. Other monkeypox cases have recently been confirmed scattered across the US, Australia, Spain, Italy, Germany, Portugal, and Sweden - the list of countries grows by the day. The first was diagnosed in the UK on May 7, and the number of cases that have been confirmed in that country has quickly doubled in the past two days, from nine infections on May 18 to 20 infections on May 20. This month, more than 140 confirmed and suspected cases have been detected in a dozen countries across Europe, North America, and Oceania. Monkeypox is spreading, and it is spreading much faster than it usually does.