Transmissible only through sex, weighs on the American election, reactivated in the laboratory… Three fake news stories circulating on the epidemic

There is a lot of misinformation circulating at the moment about the mpox epidemic, formerly known as monkeypox. Franceinfo has identified three of the most shared.

There is currently a lot of fake news circulating on social media about the mpox epidemic, formerly known as monkeypox. This disease causes skin rashes, fever and sometimes muscle pain. According to the Health Insurance, the patient is contagious from the onset of the first symptoms, which last between two and four weeks. The disease is most often mild, although there is a risk of complications in young children and people with compromised immune systems.

First fake news circulating on the social network X: MPOX is mainly transmitted among men who have sex with men. For example, one Internet user tweets about this epidemic: “Let those concerned wear condoms.”

In reality, MPOX cannot be reduced to a sexually transmitted infection. According to the World Health Organization, the virus is transmitted “by close contact” that is, when you touch an infected person, shake their hand, for example. Sexual intercourse is, of course, close contact, but it is not the only way to be contaminated. In addition, there is also a risk of contamination with MPOX when you touch a surface that an infected person has touched before you. It is also possible that this virus can be transmitted, like Covid-19 or the flu, by respiratory droplets.

Several social media users are also sharing fake news that the MPOX epidemic is causing fraud risks in the US presidential election. They are sharing a video in which Donald Trump, the Republican candidate for the White House, can be seen saying: “They want to revive the Covid hysteria to justify more lockdowns, more censorship… But to all the Covid tyrants who want to take away our freedom, listen to these words: we will not obey.”

In reality, this video is old, it dates from last year. And Donald Trump does not draw a parallel between Covid and mpox but between the first wave of Covid in 2020 and that of August 2023. This is also when the video was first published.

According to a third hoax, the mpox virus was reactivated in a laboratory. Here too, Twitter users are sharing a video that dates back to 2019. It shows a journalist from the magazine Science and life explain that Canadian researchers have recreated a strain of human smallpox in the laboratory. In fact, this is well-known research, dating back to 2017. The two Canadian scientists wanted to show that with little material and few resources, it was possible to recreate a strain of the smallpox virus and that we should therefore not relax our efforts in research into treatments and vaccines against this disease.

That said, human smallpox and mpox (or monkeypox) are not the same disease, they are very distant cousins. Human smallpox has existed for at least 3,000 years, traces of it are found in Egyptian mummies. It was officially eradicated in 1980. MPOX, on the other hand, appeared in the late 1950s. The two diseases are therefore separated by more than 5,000 years of evolution.