According to a study published Saturday, the first British monkeypox patients had symptoms different from those normally detected in African countries where the disease was considered endemic by the middle of this year (2).
According to the study, published in the scientific journal Lancet Infectious Diseases, high fever in general was considered an almost systematic symptom of the disease, but among patients evaluated in the UK this symptom was observed in just over half.
The study, conducted with approximately 50 patients, is one of the first to characterize the clinical features of the current monkeypox outbreak.
By May of this year, when monkeypox began to spread, the disease was considered endemic in only ten African countries.
However, many cases have been recorded in Europe and the Americas in recent months: more than 3,000 according to the latest data from the World Health Organization (WHO).
The UK is one of the first countries where cases were reported this year. Observations for this study were carried out at the end of May, when only one hundred patients were diagnosed in the country. Thus, the sample corresponds to more than half of the patients known in the country at that time.
In the cases studied in the United Kingdom, the disease manifested itself very differently from that generally seen in Africa. Not only because there are fewer cases of fever, but also because the duration of fever is much shorter when the body temperature rises. In addition, hospitalizations were also much less frequent.
Regarding the typical lesions of the disease, they are mainly concentrated around the genitals. In previous cases recorded in Africa, they spread to other parts of the body, affecting, for example, the face and neck.
For the study’s authors, this feature indicates that the first British cases were infected through contact during sexual intercourse. This hypothesis, which does not mean that the disease is sexually transmitted, is based on solid grounds that the disease can be transmitted by touching a lesion on the skin of another patient.
Most European and American cases have so far been reported in men who have had sex with men, but they are not the only ones affected.
The study’s authors think that their observations suggest that the definition of the disease needs to be broadened to better detect new cases, for example, by discouraging such insistence on fever.
However, having different symptoms does not mean that the current epidemic is caused by a new version of the virus, as other researchers have emphasized.
“There is no major genetic change” in the viruses sequenced in current patients, pulmonologist Hugh Adler told AFP. According to him, perhaps in Africa cases may have gone undetected because they had no fever or had limited skin lesions, jeopardizing comparisons.
source: Noticias
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