Referring the recent sequencing data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the NBC News writes that there are two genetically distinct variants of monkeypox are circulating in US. The News agency writes:

• “Two of them were found to be genetically similar to a 2021 infection in a Texas man who traveled to Nigeria. Both are in people who recently traveled to Africa — a woman from Virginia and man from Florida.
• “The rest of the sequenced U.S. cases resemble the genetic codes of the cases in Europe, and a 2021 infection in a Maryland resident who traveled to Nigeria.

In a press briefing, deputy director of the CDC’s High Consequence Pathogens and Pathology division, Jennifer McQuiston told “While they’re similar to each other, their genetic analysis shows that they’re not linked to each other. It’s likely that within the last couple of years, there have been at least two different instances where monkeypox virus spilled over to people in Nigeria from the animal that maintains it and that that virus likely began to spread through person-to-person close contact, possibly intimate or sexual contact.”

This is like tuning in to a new television series and we don’t know what episode we’ve landed on. We’re now just starting to get some of the origin story.

– Anne Rimoin, an epidemiology professor at UCLA Fielding School of Public Health (source: NBC News)

Health experts are reportedly looking into the recent quick spread the virus around World and also the possibilities that whether the virus was spreading undetected!

We might be seeing [the variants] now because we’re looking so hard. It’s certainly possible that there could have been monkeypox cases in the United States that went under the radar previously, but not to any great degree.

– Andrew Read, a professor at Pennsylvania State University who studies the evolution of infectious diseases (source: NBC News)

• Two distinct monkeypox variants found in U.S., adding to outbreak’s mystery
• CDC | Past U.S. Cases and Outbreaks

Read reportedly pointed out the fact that the monkeypox is spreading faster than the previously observed raising the possibilities that the virus may be “more transmissible”.

“Monkeypox is a DNA virus, which does not mutate as fast as RNA viruses like the coronavirus. But Read pointed out that DNA viruses have long genomes: Moneypox’s genome is seven times larger than that of the coronavirus.,” NBC News explains.

“I worry a lot about if it becomes very common in humans. The potential to become more common and more transmissible through time, as we’ve had with Covid, would be very, very unfortunate,” said Read.