Mpox was first detected in the late-1950s, and there have been sporadic outbreaks of the virus in the years since. The largest outbreak to date began in the summer of 2022, a variant of the virus known as clade II spread through the Western world, including in Britain, the US, and large parts of Europe, mainly between men who have sex with men. At least 114,000 people have been infected with the variant in the last four years, 220 of which have died. More recently, a new variant of the virus, clade 1b, emerged in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in late 2023 after undergoing a rare mutation. The virus spread rapidly through the war-torn DRC and the exact figures have still not been verified, but it is thought that there were at least 71,000 cases and almost 2,000 deaths – mainly in young children with weakened immune systems from malnutrition and the impact of other diseases like measles and malaria. The variant has also been detected in several other countries, including Britain, the …