The focus of the search for the wild animal reservoir of monkeypox was on rodents that lived around the villages and in the nearby agricultural fields. Mungbau, the chauffeur, is seen with the live traps that we loaned out to the village youth to set in the surrounding area. They were given in batches of ten to fifteen traps per trapper.Mungbau, (with the supervision of the team's pet genet), is checking each trap to make sure that they are in order before they are handed out. The traps were numbered to help track them. The local hunters were easy to train, and we paid them for their knowledge of the forest and the wildlife via the catch they brought in each day.
The villagers used their own bait and knew how to mount traps high up in trees, along waterways, around trails, and in brush piles. They had a much higher catch than we could have realized if we had done the work ourselves. The rats were identified, euthanized, and processed for their organs and blood for identification of monkeypox virus and antibodies.
Photo by D. Messinger
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