The patient: a 4-year-old Italian greyhound. Its symptoms: lesions on the skin, pustules in the abdomen and even a fine anal ulceration. A PCR test which confirms: the canine is indeed positive for the monkeypox virus. In this month of June, the teams of the Parisian hospital of Pitié-Salpêtrière have just detected the very first case of transmission of Monkeypox from man to animal. Because no doubt, the dog was contaminated in contact with one of his masters. Twelve days earlier, its owners, a couple of multipartner men aged 44 and 27, had indeed presented themselves at the hospital with characteristic signs of the disease, fatigue, headaches, anal lesions, etc. The analyses, a DNA sequencing of the virus, made it possible to show 100% homology between the virus which infected one of these patients and that of the animal. “This is the first reported case of Monkeypox in an animal contaminated by a human”, confirms the professor of infectiology in Bordeaux, Denis Malvy.
