Ten minutes later, she stopped mid-sentence to say that a colleague had just texted her a press release: “ Massachusetts Public Health Officials Confirm Case of Monkeypox.” “If we see those clusters, given the amount of travel between the United States and Europe, I wouldn’t be surprised to see cases here,” Rimoin, who studies the disease, told me. Yesterday afternoon, I called the UCLA epidemiologist Anne Rimoin to ask about the European outbreak of monkeypox-a rare but potentially severe viral illness with dozens of confirmed or suspected cases in the United Kingdom, Spain, and Portugal.
