June 8, 2003 — A rare virus usually found only in African rainforests may be responsible for a rash of illnesses in three midwestern states, officials said late Saturday.
Seventeen people in Wisconsin, at least one in Illinois and one in Indiana have fallen ill since mid-May, suffering from fever, sweats, chills, cough and a blistering rash, after handling prairie dogs sold as pets.
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All are recovering, although four of the patients are in hospital.
Officials became aware of the multiple cases on June 4 and sent tissue samples from sick prairie dogs to the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC), which confirmed monkeypox or something similar. To date the only recognized outbreaks of human monkeypox disease have occurred in Africa.
"To my knowledge this is the very first evidence of a monkeypox-like virus causing community-acquired human illness in the Western Hemisphere," said James Hughes, director of the CDC's National Center for Infectious Diseases.
Officials traced the outbreak to a shipment of prairie dogs that included a sick Gambian rat. Sold as exotic pets in the United States, Gambian rats are native to Africa and known to be susceptible to monkeypox.
"It's certainly possible that one of these Gambian rats was the original source," Hughes said. "That's certainly one of the leading hypotheses at this point.
"What we don't know is the source of the Gambian rats that the Illinois distributor had ... and the scope of the import of Gambian rats into the United States in general."
Officials are now trying to track down all the animals in the shipment, which originated with a distributor in Villa Park, Illinois who may also have sold some pets to other states.
"Everyone who has become ill in our state has come into contact with an animal," said epidemiologist Jeffrey Davis, Wisconsin's chief medical officer.
Monkeypox is caused by a virus known as an orthopoxvirus, and is from the same family of viruses as the more deadly smallpox.
Most known cases of human monkeypox occur in remote villages near rainforests in Central and West Africa, transmitted to people by infected squirrels or primates through contact with an animal's blood or a bite, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
The most recent outbreak occurred in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1997.
The fatality rate in Africa ranges from one percent to ten percent, WHO said.
Little else is known about it, and there is no known cure for Monkeypox, though officials say some anti-viral drugs may help.
"It's very important that physicians, veterinarians and the public should be aware of this very unusual outbreak and be on the lookout for symptoms," Hughes said.
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