A little over a year ago, when the COVID-19 pandemic was still a public health emergency, a little-known virus came seemingly out of nowhere to add to the world’s worries – a virus known at the time as monkeypox.
Monkeypox – since renamed mpox following criticisms that the name held misleading and racist connotations – went from sickening only a few dozen people a year to quickly infecting over 87,000 people around the globe, mostly in countries with no previous history of infection.
That led the World Health Organization to declare the mpox outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern on July 23, 2022. But following a peak in late summer of 2022, cases dropped dramatically and just ten months later, the public health emergency was declared over.
So was the mpox outbreak simply a passing threat? Or is there reason to believe another global outbreak like last year’s could happen? Experts say mpox has not gone away, but how much of a threat to human health it poses remains an open question.
Cases went up and then down — why?
Much of the world may not have heard of mpox until last year, but it has been around for over 50 years. The disease was first found in monkeys – hence the original name monkeypox – though they’re not thought to be frequent carriers of the virus.