{"id":9179,"date":"2025-04-09T12:31:39","date_gmt":"2025-04-09T17:31:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/?p=9179"},"modified":"2025-04-09T12:31:43","modified_gmt":"2025-04-09T17:31:43","slug":"an-animal-source-of-mpox-emerges-and-its-a-squirrel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/2025\/04\/09\/an-animal-source-of-mpox-emerges-and-its-a-squirrel\/","title":{"rendered":"An animal source of mpox emerges \u2014 and it\u2019s a squirrel"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"panel body-content\"><div class=\"panel__container\">\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/d41586-025-00990-8\">Nature<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Researchers solve the mystery of a disease outbreak through long-term surveillance of wildlife in Africa.<\/strong> One of the great mysteries of the monkeypox virus&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/d41586-022-03048-1\">has been pinpointing its \u2018reservoir\u2019 hosts<\/a>&nbsp;\u2014 the animals that carry and spread the virus without becoming sick from it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Now, an international team of scientists suggests that it has an answer: the fire-footed rope squirrel (<em>Funisciurus pyrropus<\/em>), a forest-dwelling rodent found in West and Central Africa<sup><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/d41586-025-00990-8#ref-CR1\">1<\/a><\/sup>. Although the name \u2018monkeypox\u2019 comes from the virus\u2019s discovery in laboratory monkeys in 1958, researchers have long suspected rodents and other small mammals in Africa of being reservoir hosts. And studies published in the past year<sup><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/d41586-025-00990-8#ref-CR2\">2<\/a><\/sup><sup>,<\/sup><sup><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/d41586-025-00990-8#ref-CR3\">3<\/a><\/sup>&nbsp;have demonstrated that African outbreaks of mpox, the disease caused by the virus, have been fuelled by several transmission events from animals to humans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Pinpointing viral reservoirs is crucial to breaking the vicious cycle of transmission, says&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/d41586-024-03900-6\">Placide Mbala<\/a>, an epidemiologist at the National Institute of Biomedical Research in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo. By identifying the sources, scientists could work with local communities to design strategies to shield people from infection \u2014 for instance, safe handling of wild-animal meat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/d41586-025-00990-8\">Continue reading<\/a><\/p>\n<a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"\/secure-location.php\" style=\"display: none;\" title=\"cQxLFPagzQC WR sl  ziQKo\">cQxLFPagzQC WR sl  ziQKo<\/a><\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Nature Researchers solve the mystery of a disease outbreak through long-term surveillance of wildlife in Africa. One of the great mysteries of the monkeypox virus&nbsp;has been pinpointing its \u2018reservoir\u2019 hosts&nbsp;\u2014 the animals that carry and spread the virus without becoming sick from it. Now, an international team of scientists suggests that it has an answer: [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9179","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-monkeypox"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9179","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9179"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9179\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9180,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9179\/revisions\/9180"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9179"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9179"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9179"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}