Plague diaries - Pox everywhere

And a potential cure.

As most readers know, I try to send one e-mail per day, unless something big happens, then it is usually a longer e-mail with shorter ones, perhaps I will keep working on my current one and send this today.

Between yesterday and right now, we got confirmation of cases elsewhere. After the list, good news.

Belgian monkeypox outbreak linked to fetish festival

Australia's first monkeypox case found in Victoria, second case 'very likely' in NSW

Monkeypox contact tracing extended to Scotland

Public Health Scotland has confirmed it is helping to trace contacts of a monkeypox patient who was identified in England.

The patient had recently travelled to Nigeria, where they were believed to have caught the virus.

A "small number of individuals" in Scotland are now reported to be in quarantine after being identified as contacts of the patient.

Dutch health agency confirms first monkeypox case in the Netherlands

A patient with monkeypox was confirmed in the Netherlands for the first time, the government's health agency said on Friday, adding more people may have become infected with the disease.

Sweden reports monkeypox case in Stockholm

A person in the Stockholm region has been confirmed infected with monkeypox, Folkhälsomyndigheten, the Swedish Public Health Agency reported today.

Monkeypox cases confirmed in Germany, France, Belgium, as European countries record 70 cases

I posted both of these on my Twitter feed yesterday.

Rediscovered Native American remedy kills poxvirus

An extract of the pitcher plant Sarracenia purpurea halted viral replication

In Vitro Characterization of a Nineteenth-Century Therapy for Smallpox

In the nineteenth century, smallpox ravaged through the United States and Canada. At this time, a botanical preparation, derived from the carnivorous plant Sarracenia purpurea, was proclaimed as being a successful therapy for smallpox infections. The work described characterizes the antipoxvirus activity associated with this botanical extract against vaccinia virus, monkeypox virus and variola virus, the causative agent of smallpox. Our work demonstrates the in vitro characterization of Sarracenia purpurea as the first effective inhibitor of poxvirus replication at the level of early viral transcription. With the renewed threat of poxvirus-related infections, our results indicate Sarracenia purpurea may act as another defensive measure against Orthopoxvirus infections.