(Science) – Mpox circulated in Nigeria for 8 years before it sparked a global outbreak. What happened? And could it have been stopped?

The first two patients were discharged; in the subsequent months another two who fit the same profile arrived. Both had more advanced HIV infections and both died. “I took their pictures, I took their histories, because I knew that one day, somebody will tell me what this thing is,” Otike-Odibi says. “This is not normal. This thing means something.”

She didn’t find out what it meant until September of that year, when patients with similar symptoms started to come to a university hospital in Yenagoa, the capital of Bayelsa state, a 3-hour drive west of Port Harcourt. Many were young men with genital lesions, and many also had HIV. Ultimately, tests revealed those patients had monkeypox, a viral disease that had only been documented in Nigeria three times, with the last case occurring 39 years earlier. (Read More)