Researchers solve the mystery of a disease outbreak through long-term surveillance of wildlife in Africa. One of the great mysteries of the monkeypox virus has been pinpointing its ‘reservoir’ hosts — the animals that carry and spread the virus without becoming sick from it.
Now, an international team of scientists suggests that it has an answer: the fire-footed rope squirrel (Funisciurus pyrropus), a forest-dwelling rodent found in West and Central Africa1. Although the name ‘monkeypox’ comes from the virus’s discovery in laboratory monkeys in 1958, researchers have long suspected rodents and other small mammals in Africa of being reservoir hosts. And studies published in the past year2,3 have demonstrated that African outbreaks of mpox, the disease caused by the virus, have been fuelled by several transmission events from animals to humans.
Pinpointing viral reservoirs is crucial to breaking the vicious cycle of transmission, says Placide Mbala, an epidemiologist at the National Institute of Biomedical Research in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo. By identifying the sources, scientists could work with local communities to design strategies to shield people from infection — for instance, safe handling of wild-animal meat.