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.
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