This is the world.

More than 250 confirmed and suspected cases of the virus have been reported across 16 countries.

Australia, Israel and Switzerland are the latest to report a presence of the virus.

In Europe and North America, it's the first time we've seen community transmission among people with no links to West or Central Africa, which has got everyone asking, what's going on?

A top advisor to the WHO has revealed there is a theory, it's spread for sexual activity,

two recent raves in Europe.

Why has monkeypox suddenly flared up across the globe?

And what can we learn from countries like Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of the

Congo, the DRC, where they've been tackling this virus for decades?

I'm in Sample, the Guardian's

Science Editor, and this is Science Weekly. I spoke to Oyawali Timori, a Nigerian

virologist who's worked with the World Health Organization on Disease Control and Prevention.

I asked him what monkey pox is and where it comes from.

It's a disease which is a pox disease found among monkey, but you talk about viruses jumping species and it has to require the contact.

You find the young people who go out into the rural areas who contact the animals, the hunters, those people trade in raw bushmeat, you know wildlife.

We know that the pox is also found in scurrels, rodents, when people hunt all those things,

you are exposing yourself to the virus.

And this virus, it is related to smallpox, right? Thepox that humans used to get before it was eradicated.

Yeah, sure. They're the same family. Ideally, we shouldn't be getting monkeypox or whatever.

Many of us were protected in the past because we had the

smallpox vaccine. The smallpox vaccine protects against monkey pox. Maybe by

it is about 85 percent but then people after the 90s have not been exposed to this

...