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Monkeypox may have undergone 'accelerated evolution,' scientists say - Livescience.com
Jun 25, 2022 1 min, 40 secs

The monkeypox virus has mutated at a far faster rate than would normally be expected and likely underwent a period of "accelerated evolution,"a new study suggests.

The virus, which has infected more than 3,500 people in 48 countries since its detection outside Africa in May, may be more infectious due to dozens of new mutations.

An orthopoxvirus, it comes from the same family and genus as the variola virus, which causes smallpox, and doesn't usually spread far beyond West and Central Africa, where it is endemic.

Monkeypox virus strains can be sorted into two clades, or lineages, known as the West African and Congo Basin clades, according to STAT.

The viruses in each clade carry different fatality rates; the West African clade has a roughly 1% fatality rate, while the Congo Basin clade kills an estimated 10% of those it infects?

The ongoing outbreak appears to be driven by the West African clade, STAT reported.

As a large double-stranded DNA virus, monkeypox is much more able to correct replication errors than an RNA virus such as HIV, meaning that the current monkeypox strain should have really only accumulated a handful of mutations since it first started circulating in 2018.

But the unprecedented speed of new infections could suggest that something may have changed about how the virus infects its hosts — and the new mutations could be a possible cause.

It's possible that the virus has been circulating in humans, at low levels, since then, picking up a slew of new mutations through its battles with enzymes.

Or it's possible that, after a monkeypox outbreak hit Nigeria in 2017, the virus mostly spread in African countries — rapidly evolving as it moved between smaller communities before mounting a resurgence in non-endemic countries this year. .

The last time monkeypox was this widespread in the United States was in 2003, when 71 people became infected with the West African clade after a shipment of infected Gambian pouched rats, imported to Texas from Ghana, passed on the disease to local prairie dogs. .

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