Monkeypox has probably been around for thousands of years, but the disease was not identified until 1958. This happened at the Statens Serum Institute in Copenhagen, where researchers found the disease in a group of macaques.
That’s why the new disease was named ‘monkeypox’ – a misleading name, because the virus mainly lives in rodents: monkeys and humans are casual hosts.
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Monkey pox is on the rise
Monkeypox is closely related to common smallpox, which killed 300 million people in the 20th century alone.
That is why several vaccination campaigns have been launched against the dreaded smallpox. The vaccines have also protected us from monkeypox, but since the deployment was scaled down in the 1970s, monkeypox is on the rise again in several African countries.
However, monkeypox is not as life-threatening as regular smallpox, and currently, without treatment, you have only a one to three percent chance of dying from it.
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WHO is still calm
The first human outbreak was reported in 1970 when six children became infected in Africa. The first victim was a nine-month-old boy in the Democratic Republic of Congo who, like the others, had not been vaccinated.
In the West, the first infection was registered in 2007 in a three-year-old American girl. She got the monkey pox from her prairie dog, which was again infected by a group of African hamsters.
For decades, the disease remained mainly in Africa, but an infection was found in Great Britain in May 2022, and monkeypox has since been officially diagnosed in 20 other countries around the world.
However, the WHO (World Health Organization) expects the outbreak to be contained.
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