They weren't hunting or handling animals but instead were middle-class men, living in busy, modern cities. These men also didn't fit the typical profile for monkeypox patients.
"Young, active men were getting monkeypox," Ogoina says. And it wasn't infecting kids but rather men in their 20s and 30s. The virus seemed to be spreading further and faster than expected. "Suddenly, we were seeing cases appear across the country," Ogoina says. Cases cropped up in counties not just near this one boy but all over. The outbreak in Nigeria began to grow rapidly. "We thought, 'OK, this is the regular monkeypox that we know.' "īut a few weeks after diagnosing the young boy, Ogoina started to become concerned – quite concerned. Ogoina and other doctors thought the outbreak in 2017 would be the same. They often involved only a few dozen cases. Eventually, that outbreak spilled out into the rest of the world.Īs a result, previous outbreaks of monkeypox have been small. The data indicate that the virus has been transmitting between people continuously in Nigeria for at least five years, probably longer. And they've traced it back to cases that occurred in Nigeria in 2017 – including the cases that Ogoina detected in his clinic. Scientists are beginning to understand where and when this massive outbreak began. Last weekend, the World Health Organization declared this outbreak a public health emergency. Since May, the world has detected more than 20,000 monkeypox cases, including more than 4,000 cases in the U.S. He was the first known case of the international monkeypox outbreak, currently spreading in 78 countries. Now scientists, including Ogoina, are just starting to realize this little boy was another first, not just for Nigeria, but also for the entire world. Over the next few months, he and his colleagues detected more than 20 additional cases at their clinic. "He was the first case of monkeypox in Nigeria in 38 years," Ogoina says. Testing is 'abysmal'Ī few days later, the results came back, and Ogoina was correct: The boy had monkeypox. Shots - Health News Monkeypox outbreak in U.S. "So we had to send our samples to Senegal and even to the U.S. "The suspicion of monkeypox just came up," he says.Īt the time, Nigeria didn't have the ability to test for the disease.
Given the size of the lesions and their location, Ogoina wondered if perhaps the boy had what was then an extremely rare disease: monkeypox. "But the boy already had chickenpox," says Ogoina. "He had very large lesions affecting his face and all over his body," says Ogoina, an infectious disease specialist at the Niger Delta University in Nigeria.
22, 2017, an 11-year-old boy came to Ogoina's clinic with a strange rash on his skin and sores inside his mouth. Dimie Ogoina saw perhaps the most important patient of his career – a patient whose infection would eventually be linked to the largest monkeypox outbreak in history. Right: The monkeypox isolation ward of Niger Delta University Teaching Hospital in Bayelsa State, Nigeria.įive years ago, Dr. Over the past few years, he has tried to warn health officials that the monkeypox virus had changed, but few listened.
Dimie Ogoina, professor of medicine and infectious diseases at Niger Delta University in Nigeria.