Background
In 2015, the UN General Assembly announced its 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, including the WHO’s aims to achieve a 90% decrease in STIs and to end the epidemic of neglected tropical diseases.1 In 2022, reports emerged regarding the sexual transmission of one such neglected tropical disease, mpox (monkeypox). Within weeks, a global outbreak was confirmed.
First described in 1958 in a colony of research monkeys in a Copenhagen laboratory, the symptoms of this new ‘mpox’ orthopoxvirus were phenotypically similar to the variola virus disease, smallpox. By 1970, the first documented case of zoonotic transmission was recorded in a 9-month-old child in the formerly named Zaire, and thus reports of human mpox entered the medical literature. It is almost certain that mpox was circulating long before its European discovery, in endemic regions of West and Central Africa, and it was not until the global eradication campaign against smallpox that…