It seems to have come out of nowhere, to the point where some people are looking for an invisible hand behind these events. But the appearance of monkeypox in European and North American news was only a matter of time. For at least a decade, notes the Rumor Detector.
It’s called “monkey” pox because scientists first identified it in monkeys in 1958. But it’s actually spread mostly in small rodents. The first confirmed case in a human dates back to 1970 in Congo. However, because the symptoms resemble those of smallpox, it is possible that cases have been seen for centuries but have been mistaken for smallpox.
Until recent weeks, it was a disease almost exclusively confined to the African continent, of which we knew two strains: the so-called Congo Basin, more virulent, and the so-called West African, which is currently occupying all minds. The fact that it is almost exclusively an African disease explains why much of the European and North American public has never heard of it before. But the experts, themselves, watched its evolution and had several times sounded the alarm.
A foreseeable event
In 2003, the first outbreak reported outside the African continent even took place: 47 confirmed cases in six US states, including Wisconsin and Indiana. She had His origin in the importation of small mammals from Ghana. But in the absence of other similar events therefollowing, the virus had somewhat fallen into oblivion.
However, as of 2010, a study reported a “strong growth” in the number of cases in Congo. In 2017, the virus was seen in Nigeria for the first time in at least 20 years: some experts talk regarding it today as an uninterrupted outbreak since that date and probably underestimated (officially some 560 cases between 2017 and April 2022).
In 2018, a report of the United States Center for Disease Control, commissioned in the context of the outbreak in Nigeria, was concerned that cases had been reported in more countries “in the past 10 years than in the previous 40 years” . Since the release of this report, isolated cases in Britain, Israel and Singapore have originated in Nigeria.
Two Belgian researchers were talking regarding it in 2018 as an emerging disease to be monitored. A literature review in 2019 —covering 71 documented outbreaks in Africa over the decades—also found an increase.
Finally, a meta-analysis published last February estimates that, since the 1970s, the number of cases would have multiplied by 10 in Central and West Africa, where the virus is today considered endemic – that is to say present permanently. The increase is particularly marked in Congo, which alone recorded 28,000 cases between 2000 and 2019.
An indirect cause of this growth, mentioned as early as 2010, might be the eradication of smallpox: following eradicating this disease everywhere in the world – whose mortality rate was 30% – vaccination campaigns ended more than 40 years ago. However, the vaccine once morest smallpox also seemed to protect once morest monkeypox: we would therefore find ourselves, 40 years later, with a large part of the population who had never been immunized once morest these viruses.
There is little data to prove this hypothesis, since monkeypox has long passed under the radar. But it is an idea defended by several experts for years. And the 2010 study, which looked at medical data from Congo from the years 2005 to 2007, estimated that people vaccinated once morest smallpox were five times less likely to catch monkeypox.
A lack of interest outside Africa
All this explains why, in recent days, African experts have been surprised at the sudden excitement over a virus which, for them, is nothing new. “The enthusiasm” to fight this virus “should have come sooner”, noted on May 24 in the Washington Post Cameroonian gene sequencing expert Christian Happi. “Perhaps it might have been eradicated by now. »
This lack of interest has translated into a lack of resources for “genomic surveillance” in Africa—contrary to what we have seen with COVID for the past two and a half years—complains the director of the Center for Disease Control. diseases of Nigeria, Ifedayo Adetifa, in the magazine Nature. Fellow African virus experts “expressed irritation that they had to fight for years to get funding and publish studies on monkeypox,” and only now health authorities around the world seem interested.
Fearing the epidemic is not a prediction
The concerns of experts have nevertheless led several groups or governments to finance actions in recent years. And some of them, in recent days, have attracted the attention of theory lovers conspiracy, on the twitosphere in particularwhere they affirm that this epidemic would have been planned.
For example, Internet users believed they had detected evidence of a conspiracy in the fact that the Canadian government launched calls for tenders for smallpox vaccines in April. Or in the fact that an American non-governmental organization had organized in 2021 a virtual simulation exercise of a terrorist attack using monkeypox.
Except that scenarios of preparation for an epidemic, there are some everywhere et since a long timesome relying on fictional viruses, others on plausible epidemics. For example, an exercise developed by Johns Hopkins University in 2017 involved coronavirus, inspired by the SARS epidemic of 2003-2004. Finally, in the followingmath of the attacks of September 11, 2001 in New York, there were even this fear that terrorists might use smallpox as a weapon.
It is in this dual context—fear of a return of smallpox and fear of monkeypox—that governments maintain vaccine supplies which were once effective once morest smallpox and which they hope will still be effective once morest monkeypox. As noted the French fact-checking site Fact and Furiousthe Canadian government’s call for tenders in April is just the latest in a long list that goes back to 2014. And if we chose to believe that this new order placed in April was proof that the epidemic was planned, we would also have to admit that the order would arrive very late: the manufacturer undertakes to deliver 500,000 vials of vaccine from 2023… to 2028.
In the post-COVID era
Without giving monkeypox enough attention in the last decade, we can predict that the tide will turn in the coming weeks and months. This might benefit screening and tracing efforts in African countries where it is endemic. As well as research efforts: among other things, we always ignore why one of the two strains is much more virulent than the other. An enigma which might prove important, insofar as, for the moment, only the less virulent strain has been observed outside the African continent.
And it is not said that this interest might not last for years. On May 23, while stressing that the risk posed by the virus for the population is “low”, the European Center for Disease Prevention mentioned as a possibility that monkeypox becomes endemic in Europe, just as it is in 11 African countries. We may not have finished hearing regarding it.
