On the evening before Juneteenth, Joseph Osmundson, one of my best friends and a microbiologist at N.Y.U., texted me: “We think Andy has monkeypox.” Two nights earlier, our friend Andy, as I’ll call him, had spent hours hunched over in an emergency room with excruciating rectal pain, only to be refused testing. It was his third try in five days. Andy’s anal sores were internal; for patients to qualify for testing, C.D.C. guidelines required the appearance of lesions on the skin. Osmundson needed help: “We’re trying everyone. Someone anyone who will send a mpx swab to nyc/nys public health department this weekend.”
Monkeypox has been around for more than five decades. It’s from the same genus of viruses as smallpox, and it transmits through close physical contact. The first reported case was in 1970, in a nine-month-old boy in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a place many associate with the words “gorillas,” “jungle,” and “war,” but which I associate with “family,” “comedy,” and “melodrama.” (Kinshasa, the capital, is my mother’s home town and where a huge portion of my family lives.) Monkeypox’s name conjures tales of illness emerging from the jungled heart of darkness to infect the world, but it likely didn’t originate in monkeys. Its natural reservoir is currently unknown, perhaps some species of rodent. (The W.H.O. has said it will rename the virus.) There are currently two strains, or clades: one that is more prevalent in the Congo Basin and another that is more common in West Africa. In these endemic regions, monkeypox kills mostly kids and pregnant women. We don’t know why, but the scientific papers on this are brutal, with descriptions of pox lesions on the placenta and newborn.
In 2003, monkeypox broke out in the U.S., affecting Wisconsin, Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, Kansas, and Missouri. Forty-seven patients came down with confirmed or probable cases of
— source newyorker.com | Ngofeen Mputubwele | Jul 23, 2022