A new study suggests that the monkeypox virus may have undergone an accelerated evolution.
More than 3,500 people have been affected by the virus in 48 countries since it was first detected outside Africa. According to a new study published in the journal Nature Medicine, the virus has 50 new mutations not seen before. According to the study authors, scientists don't expect monkeypox to get more than one or two changes every year.
Monkeypox is a disease that may be passed on to animals. It is endemic in West and Central Africa and doesn't usually spread beyond that area. The first widespread outbreak of the disease spread beyond Africa, surprising scientists and leading the World Health Organization to consider whether to classify the outbreak as a global health emergency.
The West African and Congo Basin clades are the two types of monkeypox viruses that can be sorted into. The West African clade has a fatality rate of 1% while the Congo Basin clade has a mortality rate of 10%. The West African clade is believed to be behind the current outbreak.
Everything you need to know about the Monkeypox outbreak.
The current monkeypox strain should have only accumulated a few changes since it first started circulating, because it is a large double-stranded DNA virus. The researchers found that the real mutation rate was six to 12 times higher than they had thought.
Considering previous estimates of the substitution rate for Orthopoxviruses, the huge jump in the monkey virus's rate of mutations is far more than one would expect. Our data shows more clues of ongoing viral evolution.
Monkeypox can be transmitted from person to person by close skin contact with open skin diseases, bodily fluids, or respiratory droplets coughed into the air. The rapidity of new infections could suggest that something has changed about how the virus is transmitted.
Many of the mutations identified by the researchers also carry telltale clues that they may have arisen due to the virus's contact with the human immune system The viruses are usually broken apart by these enzymes because they force them to make mistakes when copying their genes. Sometimes the virus can survive the encounter and pick up a few new genes. The researchers theorize that the battles may have caused the virus to pick up a lot of new genes in a short period of time.
There are a number of explanations as to why the virus's rate of change increased in the last year. It is possible that the virus has been circulating in humans at a low level since then, picking up a lot of new genes. The virus may have been spreading among animals in non-endemic countries without us knowing, and then this year it suddenly leapt back over to humans.
It's possible that after a monkeypox outbreak hit Nigeria in 2017, the virus mostly spread in African countries before mounting a resurgence in non-endemic countries this year.
According to the Centers for Disease and Prevention, African rope squirrel, striped mice, giant-pouched rats and brush-tailed porcupines are some of the rodents that are most likely to transmit monkeypox to humans.
The last time monkeypox was so widespread in the US was in 2003 when 71 people became sick with the West African clade after a shipment of rats imported from Africa.
A direct treatment for monkeypox has yet to be tested, but doctors are administering drugs from people who have received the vaccine. If people have the monkeypox vaccine, scientists can prevent onward infections by inoculating the close contacts of an initial case.
It was originally published on Live Science
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