Thread by @ejustin46

Is there a LINK between the two pandemics COVID and MONKEYPOX?

If we take the example of Nigeria, Monkeypox has been endemic there for several years. Its most probable origin is the rainforests of the Congo Basin, with an animal reservoir which could be that of rodents

Source :
"Genomic history of human monkey pox infections in the Central African Republic between 2001 and 2018"
nature.com/articles/s4159…

The virus would then have spread in this forest zone until Ivory Coast, thanks to significant population migrations. This area is also characterized by a very high urban concentration, one of the highest in Africa, which promotes the spread of viruses.

Between 2010 and 2019, there were 18,000 cases of Monkeypox in those countries (knowing that this number is largely underestimated) with more and more cases of human to human transmission and no longer animal to human as was the case at the start of the epidemic.

In 2020, when COVID appears in these countries including Nigeria, there are 3 cumulative phenomena:
- Health systems were concentrating most of their means on COVID to the detriment of monitoring other diseases. If we take the example of Lassa fever during COVID, we went

through lack of surveillance from 1180 cases in 2020 to 510 cases in 2021 before going back to the first 4 months of 2022 at 759 cases.
- During COVID, the vaccination rate for childhood diseases dropped sharply. The vaccination rate of yellow fever, for example,

went from 77% in 2019 to 65% in 2020. This is true also for the vaccination of smallpox, which offered some protection against monkeypox.
- The deterioration of the economic situation has generated significant population migrations and

and a deterioration of sanitary living conditions which has favored the spread of several types of virus. We often talk about the consequences of COVID on the health of populations affected by the virus, we forget that COVID has also indirectly favored the spread of other viruses

@xabitron1 @lisa_iannattone @mildanalyst @MeetJess @RadCentrism @C_A_Gustave @CorneliusRoemer @firefoxx66 @FLAHAULT @shay_fleishon @RajlabN @JosetteSchoenma @ArisKatzourakis

Some additional information on the emergence of Monkeypox.
#monkeypox #mpvx
On Sept. 22, 2017, an 11-year-old boy came to the clinic of Dr. Ogoina in Nigeria with a strange rash on his skin and sores inside his mouth. When Ogoina diagnosed the young boy with monkeypox in 2017,

he thought the virus would act the way it has for many years in other parts of Africa, when a person comes into contact with an infected animal. But a few weeks after diagnosing the young boy, Ogoina started to become concerned – quite concerned as the outbreak in Nigeria

began to grow rapidly.

He understood that there was a shift in transmission where the virus could more easily spread from person to person, that it no longer needed to jump from an animal into people. That it could possibly sustain human-to-human transmission

in a way that it couldn't before. That meant the outbreak in Nigeria would be much more difficult to stop, could possibly go on for years and eventually spill over into other countries. It was in 2017 and there was still the possibility to stop the outbreak

but the number of vaccines sent to Nigeria in 2017 was exactly … Zero.
Source :
Reemergence of Human Monkeypox in Nigeria, 2017
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…

Recently, an interesting survey has confirmed that the monkeypox has mutated since the outbreak 2017 in Nigeria very fast.

The rate is approximately 20-fold greater than the long-term evolutionary rate estimated for MPXV in the non-human animal reservoir.
Thx to @mildanalyst
An APOBEC3 molecular clock to estimate the date of emergence of hMPXV - Monkeypox
virological.org/latest

It seems incredible that after 2,5 years of pandemic, we refuse to understand, that when we let a virus spread massively in a population, the risk that it changes from its traditional reservoir host increases the risk of mutations.

This gives the impression that no lesson has been learned from COVID and especially from Omicron mutations.