Monkey pox and “retro-zoonosis”: why patients should not be around their pets

The monkeypox virus has little to do with primates, the disease simply taking its name from an outbreak in a pet store with monkeys in Copenhagen in 1958. Probably first appeared in rodents, this pathogen was then identified in humans from the 1970s in Africa. An unprecedented phenomenon has occurred since the beginning of May: hundreds of people, mainly young homosexual or bisexual men, have been infected in Europe, North America, Asia and Australia.