What We Know About Mpox
Just the facts
The World Health Organization has declared mpox a public health emergency of international concern, its strongest warning. The disease has once again started spreading beyond Africa. This time, we're facing a different, mutated version of the disease that's infecting large numbers of children.
Here's a recent example showing how the virus is spreading:
“The worst case I’ve seen is that of a six-week-old baby who was just two weeks old when he contracted mpox and has now been in our care for four weeks. He got infected because hospital overcrowding meant he and his mother were forced to share a room with someone else who had the virus, which was undiagnosed at the time.
That's from an epidemiologist and mpox expert in the DRC. Roughly 70 percent of the DRC's thousands of mpox cases are happening in children under 15, and a large number of those cases are occurring in children under five.
Overlooked research has confi…