Mpox made for scary headlines in 2022 and 2023: Tens of thousands of cases worldwide, with 30,000 in the U.S. in just one year. There were reports of painful lesions and mammoth efforts to mobilize vaccines.

In 2025, it seems like just a memory. Only it's not.

"You see the agony the patient goes through. It's on another level," says Caroline Mugun, a nurse at an mpox isolation ward in Mombasa, Kenya.

Over the past year, the virus has spread rapidly across borders in Africa. Twenty-four African countries are in the midst of mpox outbreaks — up from 13 a year ago, according to the Africa Center for Disease Control and Prevention. For many of these countries – from the Gambia to Kenya, from Uganda to South Sudan — this is the first time they've ever seen cases of mpox.

Today – August

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