BARCELONA — For decades now, experts believed monkeypox would simply stay put in Africa. This May, the zoonotic virus proved the fallacy of that idea, appearing in 23 countries — many of them in Europe —prompting the World Health Organization to declare Sunday that it was a “moderate” global public health risk.
“It’s an unusual situation,” Dr. Sylvie Briand, director of Pandemic and Epidemic Diseases Department at the WHO, said during a webinar on Monday. “Before, we had [monkeypox] only in certain countries. Now it’s out of the box.”
A 2003 electron microscope image shows mature, oval-shaped monkeypox virions and immature, spherical virions obtained from a sample of human skin. (Cynthia