(Lauren Pelley/ CBC News) — As global outbreaks of monkeypox made headlines, Dr. Antoine Cloutier-Blais’s Montreal clinic began seeing patients with unusual — and often painful — bodily lesions.
By early June, the family physician and his colleagues had treated around 15 patients with confirmed infections, out of the roughly 100 lab-confirmed cases reported so far in Quebec. People with suspected infections soon started showing up to the clinic on a near-daily basis.
Cloutier-Blais began to notice some interesting trends.
The pox lesions, he found, weren’t presenting exactly like what he’d seen in photos circulating online of people infected in parts of Africa, where the virus had been found for decades. (…)