Monkeypox DNA hints virus has been spreading in people for years

Genome sequencing confirms that monkeypox cases outside Africa are all related and suggests the virus responsible may have been circulating in people since 2017 Rather than jumping to humans from animals recently, the monkeypox virus variant responsible for the worldwide outbreak may have been circulating in people for years, DNA sequencing suggests. “We therefore suggest that the pattern we see… means that there has been sustained human to human transmission since at least 2017,” states an initial report by Áine O’Toole and Andrew Rambaut at the University of Edinburgh in the UK. Because monkeypox normally circulates in animals in some African countries and occasionally jumps to people there, person-to-person spread is more likely to have gone unnoticed for years on that continent, says Emma Hodcroft at the University of Bern in Switzerland. But sometime this year, the virus spread to Europe and beyond. As of 6 June, monkeypox infections have been confirmed in more...