One pandemic was bad enough. But in the summer of 2022, just as people were getting over the shared fear and trauma of the COVID global outbreak, world health officials declared a new public health emergency, thanks to the spread of the so-called monkeypox virus.
It’s fair to say that a lot of people went ape over the news. What the heck was monkeypox? Was it anything like chickenpox … or worse, smallpox? Was this the start of another pandemic? Just how deadly was this new viral threat?
Luckily for all of us, the answers to many of those questions were no. Monkeypox was not the new COVID, nor was it actually all that new to medical science. But even though it’s not a death sentence to most people who get it, monkeypox is still a serious virus worth knowing more about.
