Italy's monkeypox cases all men - Spallanzani

(ANSA) - ROME, JUN 3 - Italy's 20 or so confirmed monkeypox cases are all men, the country's top infectious disease hospital, the Spallanzani in Rome, said Friday.
    It said it was "plausible" they had contracted the disease during sex.
    An article published by Spallanzani researchers in Eurosurveillance, the journal of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), is the first detailed description of an outbreak of the virus, together with two other rapid communications by British and Portuguese researchers, published in the same number of the journal.
    They all posit that transmission by direct contact during sex is the most plausible contagion cause.
    The Spallanzani article also describes the first monkeypox viral genome sequencing completed in Italy.
    It was registered on GeneBank on May 26.
    The sequencing shows that all the Italian cases belong to the West African clade of the virus, like other research.
    Arezzo's San Donato Hospital contributed to the description of the cases. (ANSA).