Mpox: two years on

A picture of the patient’s lesions came through on WhatsApp. Doctors in Kamituga, a mining town in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), thought that they might be dealing with a case of smallpox—but Leandre Murhula Masirika knew better.“I saw the picture and said, ‘This is mpox,’” recalls Murhula, who is an mpox specialist at the Natural Sciences Research Centre in Bukavu. He made some phone calls and headed to Kamituga, where his suspicions were confirmed.That was last autumn. Since then, genomics studies by Murhula and colleagues indicate that the doctors in Kamituga have been dealing with a new strain of the “monkeypox” virus that causes mpox: a strain known as clade Ib.1 This is distinct from the clade IIb version of the virus that drove a huge global outbreak of mpox in 2022. At the hospital in Kamituga, 20 cases are now arriving every week.So alarming is the…
Read Original Article: Mpox: two years on »