LA public health emergency of international concern was declared in August by the World Health Organization (WHO) due to an unprecedented outbreak of mpox in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), in Kivu, and in bordering countries previously free of the disease. A new subclade 1b of the virus has emerged in the area, confirming the now strictly human-to-human transmission of this disease, formerly known as “monkeypox”. Since September 2023, the start of the current epidemic, the DRC has reported more than 15,000 suspected cases of mpox, far from the 4,000 cases reported in previous years.
Although this epidemic is worrying the international community, it is not the first time that COPD, a disease that has been neglected until now, has left its African cradle.
In 2003, cases had appeared in children in the United States, with lesions on the hands and a case of encephalitis. The investigation made it possible to trace the chain of contamination back to prairie dogs, themselves contaminated in a pet store by Gambian rats from Ghana. The virus was therefore identified in animals from a country where no animal or human cases of mpox had been reported. A revelation of the involvement of the live animal trade in the occurrence and spread of viruses.
Crossing the species barrier
The global mpox epidemic of 2022 surprised the international community, which was then convinced that it was a mainly zoonotic disease, occurring in forested areas of Africa. This time, the epidemic was spreading within the Western homosexual community. Since 2017, in Nigeria, genital forms of this disease had also appeared in young men in urban areas: an epidemiological change that had not been sufficiently taken into account internationally.
In 2017, a first case was detected in Port Harcourt, a southern city producing palm oil, thirty-nine years after the last human case of mpox occurred in this country. Genomic studies suggest that The species barrier is believed to have crossed as early as 2014 in two Nigerian regions characterized by oil palm plantations. This intensive exploitation causes a massive simplification of ecosystems, with extinctions of specialist species and proliferations of opportunistic species such as rodents. Palm nuts are in fact very popular with small tree squirrels suspected of being the reservoir of mpox.
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