From New York Times, I'm Michael Barrow. This is Adelaide.

Today, the story of the other virus now threatening the US and the plan to try to contain it.

I spoke with my colleague, Appurva Mondeveeli, about what we now know about monkey box.

It's Thursday, June 16th.

Appurva, a few days ago, you came to us and you said, I think it's time to do an episode on monkey box, which we take seriously, especially given the scale of public health challenges that we already face right now.

So why did you say that to us? Why is now the right moment to talk about this disease?

There are a few different reasons. I thought we should probably talk about monkey box now.

One is that public health agencies, in the United States, the CDC, but also the World Health Organization are very concerned about this virus being seen in all these countries where it normally has never been seen before.

Health experts say it's the worst outbreak in the Western Hemisphere since 2003.

It's an unusual situation because we have a high number of cases in many countries.

And the numbers are rising really, really quickly. So, for example, the World Health Organization first heard about monkey box cases in the UK on May 13th, almost exactly a month ago.

And just a few weeks later, here we are.

Out of abundance of caution, the CDC is upgrading guidance for monkey box, elevating it to a level two.

With other cases reported in New York, Florida, Colorado, Illinois, and Utah.

And the United States, we now have 84 cases in 17 states and the District of Columbia. So, those numbers have gone up very fast. And yet, it is actually still early enough to contain if people find out what this virus is, if they are quick to seek help when they start to see symptoms.

If we all sort of do our part, we could still contain this virus before it gets out of control.

Because it's early enough.

Well, let's establish some very basic information about monkey box.

What exactly is it? I have to say the only thing I really know about it is that given its name, it obviously seems to have originated with monkeys.

Yeah, you know, that's actually not possibly the case. It's a bad name in many ways because it was first identified in monkeys, but we don't actually know what its natural reservoir is.

And it's actually most often transmitted by rodents. So, there is actually quite a big push right now from public health experts to try and rename it.

But for the moment, it's called monkey pox. And like the name sort of sounds, it is actually very closely related to smallpox, which we have not seen anywhere in the world since 1980.

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