
CDC scientists pursue deadly monkeypox virus in Africa - whyenot
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/national/health-science/monkeypox/?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_monkeypox%3Ahomepage%2Fstory
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Cthulhu_
Africa is very large, and Africans is a very broad description of people who
live in the continent. The article talks about Congo, which puts the disease
in sub-Saharan Africa, already being a lot more specific.

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Knufen
Why does the title say mysterious if we know it's monkey pox? Is it because we
don't understand the virus mechanism or what?

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wila
Washington post title is "CDC scientists pursue deadly monkeypox virus in
Africa", different from what has been submitted.

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misnome
The clickbaity title seems to actually be the one used on the front page of
WP. For me, the actual article title is “Chasing a Killer” which isn’t much
better really.

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chiefalchemist
Re: "Worldwide, animal-borne infectious diseases that jump to humans are on
the rise."

Is that true? Or is this due to detection methods? (I presume it's the
latter.)

I'm also curious, would similar things happen in developed countries if the
factor farm food supply (e.g., chicken, pigs, etc.) if there wasn't such high
use of chemicals, meds (abx), etc. Why isn't the rain forest of Brazil a hot
bed for such things?

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marcosdumay
> Why isn't the rain forest of Brazil a hot bed for such things?

Why would it be?

It looks like one of the least imaginable places for those things to appear.
Very few people, modern agriculture, access to developed medicine, almost no
history of human colonization.

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chiefalchemist
Or. Why isn't it? Or might it be but we don't know, yet?

To me it seems like a combination of wild life and minimal - but enough -
human contact with that. I mean, what's to stop deer ticks from something more
than Lymes Disease? I would imagine it's nothing.

Yet, these things seem to happen in Africa nearly exclusively. What
evolutionary context does this? This is, why?

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marcosdumay
> Yet, these things seem to happen in Africa nearly exclusively.

If you look at animal flu transmission to humans, it's almost always central
America or Asia, for really well understood causes. Europe has a history of
importing those diseases from Asia, and, of course, America has a history of
importing them from Europe.

All said, there's a reason to expect most of transmissions to happen on
Africa. It's were we are from, and all the animals most similar to us live
there.

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chiefalchemist
Agreed. The flu seems to work that way. But why do these "exotic" viruses seem
to be exclusive to Africa?

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MayeulC
I really dislike the site layout. It makes it quite difficult to read on a
desktop computer.

Just scrolling to continue reading steals the article text and replaces it
with an animated image or map. I admit it's really pretty, but I care more
about the content than the presentation, and the latter makes reading the
former difficult.

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squarefoot
And it pushes my CPU usage constantly above 20% (otherwise 1%) on a i5 desktop
machine with a 27" monitor. I just wonder how painful would be navigating it
on a netbook or small laptop, not to mention tablets.

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retzkek
I just read through it on an older ASUS Chromebook Flip (ARM, 4GB) without
issue. I found it to be a clever and engaging presentation format for a
tablet. If I were on my desktop I'd probably go for the print view though.

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jmnicolas
If you read the full article a tldr; would be much appreciated.

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Natsu
There's a smallpox variant called monkeypox that seems to come from contact
with animals from Africa which is communicable, incurable, and deadly about
10% of the time. The smallpox vaccine is only 85% effective against it. They
suspect various African rodents of spreading the disease, so scientists are
trapping them, freezing them, and shipping them off to laboratories for
analysis. There have been several outbreaks in African and the disease once
spread to America because some animals brought over from Africa were kept in
the same facility, and then infected, other animals sold as pets. One of these
pets was a prairie dog that bit and infected a 3 year old American girl.

The rest of the article appears to be background about them hanging out in
remote villages near the site of recent outbreaks.

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Gustomaximus
Also note this is a long know virus and not considered an immediate threat,
though it is high on the watchlist via concern it could mutate.

