Australian health officials on Friday reported their first confirmed case of monkeypox, diagnosed in a traveler who recently returned from Britain to Melbourne.

People can contract monkeypox through very close contact with people who are infected with the virus.

The virus is considered rare, relatively mild, and not highly contagious among humans, which makes the intercontinental spread of the current outbreak a little puzzling.

Monkeypox can also spread between humans through sexual contact.

“This is the most important outbreak in the history of monkeypox in the Western Hemisphere,” UCLA epidemiology professor Anne Rimoin told NBC News on Thursday.

“What we’re facing right now seems to be at least a subset of cases that don’t have any history of travel to one of those countries in Africa where the monkeypox virus naturally occurs, and also don’t report any exposure to someone who has been diagnosed with monkeypox.

Former Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Scott Gottlieb told CNBC on Friday that monkeypox is unlikely to become a “major epidemic” like Chinese coronavirus because “this is a virus that’s difficult to spread.”.