Monkeypox, a disease that rarely shows up outside a belt of countries across Central and West Africa, has exploded into the news recently, with cases reported in the United Kingdom, Spain, Portugal, the United States, Sweden, Italy, and likely Canada.
At this point, the cases are mainly being detected by clinics that treat sexually transmitted diseases and are being seen in men who have sex with men. But the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have cautioned that to assume the virus is only circulating in a single subset of the population risks missing cases that may be occurring among other people.
Monkeypox causes a flu-like array of symptoms, but also comes with a distinctive rash; one telltale sign is the fact that lesions often appear on the palms of hands.
“Monkeypox patients that I’ve spoken with, they often talk about quite a protracted illness with kind of flu-like syndrome with respiratory involvement. They talk about a lot of malaise, achiness. They’re tired. And the lesions themselves often are described as being very painful, irrespective of where they occur on the body,” [said epidemiologist Andrea McCollum.]
