Gay Couple's Dog Tests Positive For Monkeypox, Human To Animal Transmission Suspected

Paris: In a one of its kind incident, French researchers have recorded the first case of a dog with a confirmed monkeypox virus infection that might have been transferred through human transmission.

Published in the medical journal The Lancet, a team from the Sorbonne University in Paris documented the case of monkeypox virus in two men who happen to be gay: an HIV-positive Latino man, aged 44 years, living with undetectable viral loads on antiretrovirals; and an HIV-negative white man, aged 27 years.

Their 4-year-old male Italian greyhound, having no previous medical disorders, got detected with the virus, just twelve days after his owners showed symptoms of monkeypox.

The men, who are non-exclusive partners living in the same household, presented with anal skin ulcers 6 days after sex with other partners.

An anal skin ulcer was followed by a rash on the face, ears, and legs in the Latino man while the white man had it on the legs and back.

The commonality in both cases was that rash was associated with weakness, headaches, and fever 4 days later.

The dog, who was co-sleeping with the men, presented with mucocutaneous (involving both typical skin and mucous membrane) lesions, including red, tender bumps with white pus on the abdomen and an anal skin ulcer.

The team sequenced monkeypox virus DNA from the dog and the Latino man and found that the samples contained virus of the hMPXV-1 clade, lineage B.1, which has been spreading in non-endemic countries since April.

"To the best of our knowledge, the kinetics of symptom onset in both patients and, subsequently, in their dog suggest human-to-dog transmission of monkeypox virus," Sophie Seang, from the University`s Infectious Diseases Department, along with her team wrote in the paper.

Given the dog`s skin and mucosal lesions as well as the positive monkeypox virus PCR results from anal and oral swabs, we hypothesise a real canine disease, not a simple carriage of the virus by close contact with humans or airborne transmission (or both)," the team added.

"Our findings should prompt debate on the need to isolate pets from monkeypox virus-positive individuals," the team said, calling for further investigation on secondary transmissions via pets.

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