Montreal public health officials confirmed Thursday they were investigating 17 possible cases.
Monkeypox, which is in the same viral family as smallpox, was discovered in 1958 and is rarely seen in significant numbers outside of Central and West Africa.
“We do not have to panic. It is not something you can acquire in a grocery store or on public transportation,” the city’s director of public health, Dr. Mylène Drouin, said during a media conference. The suspect cases in Montreal are mainly among men between the ages of 30 and 55 who have had sex with other men, Drouin said. Officials say some of the patients they are investigating as possible monkeypox cases have oral and genital lesions. None of the cases has yet been confirmed through laboratory testing and they are not severe, she said.Article content
Typically cases outside of Africa have been related to travel or connected with imported pets and limited to one or a small number of cases, Brown said. In Montreal, Drouin said public health officials were still investigating links between the suspect cases in that city and did not know whether the first case reported on May 12 came from someone who had travelled.On Wednesday, the U.S. identified its first case in a Massachusetts man who had recently travelled to Canada. The United Kingdom began vaccinating some close contacts of cases and health workers with smallpox vaccine.
Smallpox, part of the same viral family as monkeypox, killed millions of people over centuries before it was eradicated in 1981. It is the only infectious disease to be eradicated and is also at the heart of the vaccine revolution.
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