The first thing everyone should understand about monkeypox is that it has very little to do with monkeys.
“It was first discovered in monkeys in a laboratory setting in Denmark; it infects monkeys and has been isolated from monkeys; however, monkeys are not the primary reservoir for the disease,” explains Sagan Friant, an anthropologist at Pennsylvania State University in the United States. “We think of a reservoir as an animal that can transmit the disease without suffering or dying.
Friant had been investigating monkeypox in Nigeria for over 15 years and was preparing to start a new research project when the Covid-19 outbreak hit. She believes that the monkeypox virus originated in rodents, albeit this has yet to be verified. The World Health Organization declared at the end of 2022 that the virus would be renamed mpox.
