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Monkeypox Has Mutated at an Unprecedented Rate with 'Accelerated Evolution' - Newsweek
Jun 24, 2022 1 min, 37 secs
Usually monkeypox is localized within West and Central African countries but this year has seen the first multi-country outbreak, including cases without known links to West or Central Africa, with more than 3,500 cases reported as of Thursday, according to the U.S.

João Paulo Gomes, head of the Genomics & Bioinformatics Unit at the National Institute of Health in Portugal who co-authored the study, said it is not known whether the mutations have contributed to increased transmissibility between people.

Another notable finding from the study is that most of the mutations are of a particular type that could have been introduced by a human defence mechanism called APOBEC3, which works by introducing mutations to viruses in order to stop them from working properly, said Pam Vallely, professor of medical virology at the University of Manchester.

"However, in this case the mutations are apparently not making the virus non-viable and may be helping it to adapt to human-human transmission," Vallely, who was not involved in the study, told Newsweek.

Jeremy Kamil, associate professor of microbiology and immunology at Louisiana State University Health Shreveport, told Newsweek the study as "very impressive" but said it is too early to say for sure whether monkeypox is undergoing rapid evolution until we can rule out the possibility that the virus has been circulating and adapting in people "for longer than people assume—perhaps starting out in undersampled regions of the world like parts of Africa where monkeypox is endemic.".

Virus sequencing efforts also confirmed that the viruses studied belonged to a specific type of monkeypox virus known as clade 3, confirming them to be part of the wider West African type as opposed to the Central African type

The West African version of monkeypox, with a case fatality ratio of usually less than one percent, is much less virulent than the Central African clade 1 version which can cause death in more than 10 percent of cases, according to the study

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