“Monkey pox can masquerade as other diseases,” said Dr Rosamund Lewis, Canadian physician and technical lead for the monkey pox outbreak at the World Health Organization (WHO).
Agam Rao, a poxvirus and rabies branch physician at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in an interview with the medical journal JAMA.įor clinicians unfamiliar with the virus, it can also be difficult to differentiate some monkeypox infections from chickenpox – or some sexually transmitted infections like herpes and syphilis. “In these new cases, what we hear is that those the symptoms can be really mild or even not noticed at all,” said Dr.
Yet for recent patients in the United States, the appearance of a rash was often the first warning sign that they were sick. Monkeypox often appears as a flu-like illness, characterized by symptoms such as fever, chills, and muscle stiffness that may precede the telltale lesions. Photos taken in a clinical setting show monkeypox lesions on patients in the UK during a global outbreak of cases beyond typical endemic regions for the virus in Africa.
