‘Not Again’: A Weary Europe Greets Monkeypox With a Touch of Fatalism
LONDON — With the cost of living soaring, a devastating war in Ukraine and the coronavirus still circulating, many Europeans had already been feeling anxious and drained.
Then came some more unwelcome news: Monkeypox, a rare viral illness that causes pus-filled rashes, had appeared in more than a dozen countries in the region. “My first reaction was: Another plague coming to us?
What’s next?” said Adrián Sanjosé, 38, from Spain, as he sat at Rome’s Fiumicino airport waiting to fly to his home in London. “We have a pandemic, a war, what else?” But for some people, with a threshold for worry already tested by the coronavirus, initial bewilderment about a disease few had heard of before its reported appearance in Europe this month quickly faded into a sense of weary fatalism. “I’m trying to be positive and not think about it,” Sourena Naji, a 27-year-old bartender in east London, said on Tuesday. “I was like: Not again.” Health experts say monkeypox is unlikely to wreak the same kind of havoc as Covid, which has killed millions, infected more than half a billion people, and ravaged the world’s economy.
Human-to-human transmission of monkeypox, which is endemic to West and Central Africa and typically caught by coming into close contact with infected animals, is rare but happening through close physical contact, according to the World Health Organization.
