Canada has reported its first two confirmed cases of monkeypox amid fears the rare virus is also in New York City.
Health officials in Canada on Thursday said that two people had tested positive for the virus after authorities in Quebec province said they were investigating 17 suspected cases.
Meanwhile, the New York City health department is investigating a possible case of monkeypox in the Big Apple, a day after officials confirmed the first US case of the virus in Massachusetts.
The unnamed patient is currently being treated at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan, city health officials confirmed to DailyMail.com on Thursday.
Medical officials have implemented appropriate isolation protocols and are conducted preliminary tests in an effort to confirm the diagnosis.
If positive, the tests will be sent to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for confirmatory testing.
The health department’s epidemiologists will also follow-up with all those who may have been in contact with the patient during their infectious period.
Monkeypox, which mostly occurs in west and central Africa, is a rare viral infection similar to smallpox, though milder.
There are now confirmed cases of monkeypox in nine countries outside of Africa, including the U.S., Canada, Australia, Belgium, Portugal, Spain, Italy, the UK and Sweden.
On Friday, Australia reported its first monkeypox case in a traveller who recently returned from Britain.
A man in his 30s who arrived in Melbourne on Monday has the virus, Victoria state’s health department said, while a probable case of infection was identified in Sydney in a man in his 40s who had recently travelled to Europe.
Both men developed mild symptoms after arriving back in Australia with symptoms clinically compatible with monkeypox, officials said.
The Massachusetts Department of Public Health on Wednesday confirmed a single case of monkeypox virus infection in a man who had recently traveled to Canada.
He has been hospitalized, but is in good condition, officials report.
The Massachusetts agency said it was working with the CDC and relevant local boards of health to carry out contact tracing, adding that ‘the case poses no risk to the public.’
America joins six European countries: Italy, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Belgium and the UK in confirmed cases.
Belgium confirmed their first case of monkeypox in the province of Antwerp on Thuersday. The person’s partner is being tested for the virus as they are showing symptoms.
Meanwhile, the first suspected case of the monkeypox virus on French territory has been detected in the Paris/Ile-de-France region, the French Health Ministry said on Thursday.
Canada has also confirmed two cases of monkeypox while at least 17 suspected cases are being investigated in Montreal, Quebec’s largest city.
U.S. officials are also probing six people who were on a place ride with a Briton that later tested positive for the virus. No deaths have been tied to the virus during this outbreak.
Monkeypox was first recorded in the Democratic Republic of Congo in the 1970s. The number of cases in West Africa has increased in the last decade.
It is an uncommon disease that usually causes symptoms of fever, muscle aches, swollen lymph-nodes, headaches and skin rashes starting on the face and spreading to the rest of the body.
Dr. Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease expert at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, told DailyMail.com Thursday that the virus is spreading via physical touch – and that it only spreads through respiratory droplets in the air in people that are already exhibiting symptoms.
This changes the formula for how the virus spreads compared to what Americans are typically used to after two years of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Dr Amesh Adalja (pictured), an infectious disease expert at Johns Hopkins, warned that there will likely be more cases of the virus in the U.S., but it is too early to say if it will eclipse the record mark of 43 cases set in 2003
It also gives an explanation as to why many of the cases detected in Europe are among gay and bisexual men.
‘It spreads through close bodily contact,’ Adalja explained. ‘It is just in the past it has been more of an animal to human thing… but with close contact it has always been known to spread.’
He also doubts that the six Americans believed to have been potentially exposed to the virus on the plane would have contracted it either, due to the small likelihood they had physical touch with others on the plane.
‘If they were just on the same plane, I don’t necessarily think you would see transmission,’ Adalja said.
‘If they were next to the patient though, then this is more likely.’
Ahead of the Massachusetts case, no monkeypox diagnosis had previously been identified in the U.S. this year. Texas and Maryland each reported a case in 2021 in people with recent travel to Nigeria.
The virus is mostly found in Nigeria, though there was a 40-year period without a single reported case before it re-emerged in the African nation in 2017.
In typical outbreaks, around one-in-ten cases are fatal, though some experts believe the mortality risk of the strain currently making its way across the world is as low as only one percent.
There was initial speculation that there could be a sexual transmission factor at play during this recent outbreak, as many people who initially tested positive for the rare virus were gay or bisexual men. Adalja says that it is too early to determine why, but there are a few reasonable explanations.
‘It may have just been they were all at a party together and a party where all friends happened to be of a certain sexual orientation,’ he explained. ‘We don’t know whether it was sexual contact, it just needs a touch of the skin of someone.’
He warns it is likely that more cases of the rare virus in the U.S., though it is unclear whether case figures will eclipse the record 43 cases that were detected in America during a 2003 outbreak.
The CDC is warning that men who have sex with other men seem to be most at risk at the moment, as it is traveling through their sexual network, all healthcare providers should be on alert.
‘Many of these global reports of monkeypox cases are occurring within sexual networks. However, healthcare providers should be alert to any rash that has features typical of monkeypox,’ Dr. Inger Damon, director of CDC’s Division of High-Consequence Pathogens and Pathology, said in a statement released Wednesday night.
‘We’re asking the public to contact their healthcare provider if they have a new rash and are concerned about monkeypox.’
The CDC also notes that many of the lesions that appear as a result of monkeypox infection may have similarities to symptoms of STIs like syphilis, herpes, HSV, and others. The agency also warns says that even people who are not gay or bisexual men should be on the look out.
The prevalence of cases in the UK, for which nine cases have been confirmed so far, also puts America in particular at an increased risk of of outbreak.
Dr. Jennifer McQuiston, a senior official at the CDC, told Stat News: ‘There’s a lot of travel between the U.K. and the United States and other global area.
‘So I think our concern is that given that you do have four cases among men who have sex with men, that we probably need to be thinking about messaging to our STI clinics … about what to be on the lookout for, what to be alert for.’
There are no therapeutics available that are specifically targeted at the condition – because of how low its prevalence is – though many drugs that are effective against smallpox can also treat the monkeypox.
There is a vaccine available to prevent infection from the virus.