#U.S. experts say monkeypox viruses will be more contagious#【Will monkeypox viruses become more contagious and thus threaten the world?] The outbreak of the "monkeypox" virus in many European and American countries is constantly attracting the attention of the media in these countries. Among them, the National Public Broadcasting Network (NPR) recently published an interview with two medical experts from the University of California and the U.S. Army Institute of Infectious Diseases Medical Research in 2017 on the monkeypox issue. The two experts first said that although "monkeypox" sounds like a virus from monkeys, it is not monkeys that mainly carry and transmit this virus, but rodents such as rats and squirrels. The virus is called "monkeypox" because it was first detected in monkeys in 1958, and the earliest recorded human case appeared in Africa in 1970.
The two experts also said that the virus had caused an outbreak in the United States as early as 2003, when the virus was carried by a group of squirrels and Gambian rats shipped from Ghana in Africa to Illinois in the United States, and later transmitted to prairie dogs sold as pets in the United States, which in turn infected 47 people. But the two experts said the infected people had recovered, no one had passed the virus on to others, and the outbreak was "quickly brought under control."
But while two experts say monkeypox is not a new virus and has existed in the world for centuries or even millennia, the virus is increasingly contagious. In 2010, for example, a team of experts found that the infectivity of monkeypox in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in Africa has grown from 1 infection per 10,000 people since the 1980s to 14 infections per 10,000 people in 2010. The expert believes that the occurrence of this situation may be related to the "elimination" of smallpox virus in humans, because after that people are no longer vaccinated against smallpox virus, but this vaccine is also very effective against monkeypox virus, the effectiveness is about 85%, so this may lead to an increase in monkeypox cases.
Will the monkeypox virus become more contagious and pose a global threat? The two experts said the answer is yes, because whenever a virus breaks out in humans, the virus evolves to spread more adapted to spreading in humans as more and more people infect. The two experts also used the example of Ebola virus, saying that people did not think that Ebola virus could be easily transmitted among humans, but later found that the virus can even infect medical personnel wearing protective equipment. Therefore, scientists have been concerned about whether there will be a new way of transmission of this virus.
Finally, the editors of the National Public Broadcasting Network summed it up themselves, saying that the NEW CROWN outbreak has proved that the virus can constantly mutate when it infects humans, and then become more contagious. Therefore, the editors of the website believe that this round of monkeypox virus epidemics in Europe and the United States "may be a signal that the virus has changed."
