The Alaska Department of Health and Human Services reported two new cases of a mysterious virus.
One was a boy with a sore on his left elbow
Both people were diagnosed after receiving urgent care at a Fairbanks-area clinic. One was a boy with a sore on his left elbow, along with fever and swollen lymph nodes. And the other was an unrelated middle-aged woman with a pox mark on her leg, swollen lymph nodes, and joint pain.
In both cases, symptoms improved within 3 weeks.
It is not the first time that cases of ‘Alaskan smallpox’ have been detected
This is not the first time that the so-called Alaska smallpox virus has been detected in the region. In 2015, a woman who lived near Fairbanks presented to her doctor’s office with a single, red, smallpox-like mark on her upper arm and a feeling of fatigue.
Sampling of the smallpox mark showed that it was caused by a previously unidentified virus from the same family as smallpox and cowpox.
Five years later, another woman appeared with similar signs and symptoms, and her smallpox also turned out to be the result of what public health experts began calling the Alaska smallpox virus.
In both cases, the women made a full recovery.
Smallpox-like disease
Public health detectives found that in three of the four cases. Patients lived in a house with a cat or cats, and one of these cats was known to hunt small animals.
Experts already knew that cats mixed in the pastures of cows and sick with the cattle virus had helped cowpox make the leap from cattle to humans. And as in the case of cowpox, they suspected that cats could also be transmitting this new virus to people.
Infected people lived in sparsely populated areas in the middle of forests.
The four infected people lived in sparsely populated areas in the middle of forests. Officials placed animal traps where some of the affected people lived and identified the virus in several species of small wild animals.
The animals that appeared most frequently were the Alaskapox. A little field mouse. Rodents with rounded snouts are known to burrow in the region. And scientists suspect that the Alaska smallpox virus is passed from these wild animals to humans through their domestic cats or possibly through direct exposure to the open air.
None of the four people identified so far with Alaskan smallpox knew or interacted
None of the four people identified so far with Alaska smallpox knew or interacted. So officials also suspect that there are more cases that go unrecognized, possibly because the symptoms are mild or nonexistent.
There are no documented cases of person-to-person transmission of Alaska smallpox, according to public health officials monitoring the small number of cases. But other smallpox viruses can be spread by direct contact with skin lesions, so doctors recommend that people cover the wounds with bandages.
At first, three of the people with Alaskan smallpox mistook their injury for a spider or insect bite.
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