Girl with Monkeypox

This photo shows a seven-year old Zairian girl afflicted with a disease called monkeypox, two days after the onset of the rash. (She survived, and there was no scaring.) Only 400 cases of this rare disease had been described in West and Central Africa when, as a Peace Corps volunteer, I was "loaned" to the World Health Organization to lead the virus ecology team in research to learn the animal reservoir of monkeypox.

Monkeypox closely resembled smallpox, the only disease that has ever been eradicated from the face of the earth (with the exception of two research laboratories). The virus was so similiar to smallpox that the smallpox vaccination was protective against monkeypox, and clinically there were only minor differences between the two illnesses.

Smallpox had no animal reservoir, and it was passed from human to human. An aggressive worldwide vaccination program literally vaccinated a geographical ring around active cases and the disease was snuffed out, country by country, until it was eradicated in the late 1970's.

Many questions were raised about the newly described disease. Where was it coming from in the wild? How easily did it pass from one human to another? Would it cessation of the protective smallpox vaccination cause monkeypox infection to skyrocket? Most importantly, could it mutate and become a new global problem?

Photo by M. Sczeniowski, WHO