Table 1.
Summary of clinical symptoms, day of primary and generalized lesions onset, and day of first detection of immune response in each experimental animal.
Fig 1.
Representative images of cutaneous lesions after experimental challenge with Congo Basin (A, C, E and G) or West African (B, D, F and H) clades of MPXV.
(A and B) Pictures of scarification site lesions, (C and D) secondary lesions C and D, (E and F) tongue lesions; and (G and H) eyelid lesions for animals in each experimental group.
Table 2.
PCR results and viral load for sampled tissues obtained from animal W-MPXV 4 during necropsy.
Fig 2.
Biotelemetry measurements of temperature (A and B) and activity (C and D); and weight (E and F) of Cricetomys challenged with West African or Congo Basin MPXV.
(A and B) Recorded core body temperature for experimental and control groups with higher temperatures for animals in C-MPX compared to controls. (C and D) Activity levels showing reduced activity for most experimental animals until day 9 p.i. (C-MPX) and day 12 p.i. (W-MPX), and becoming more active afterwards. (E and F) Weight loss was observed in experimental animals but not in the control group. W-MPX 4 died on day 13 p.i., thus, no information is available for this animal after this day.
Table 3.
Range of days p.i. in which collected samples were PCR positive (top section), contained viable virus (middle section), and the maximum viral load found for each individual.
Fig 3.
Viable viral load (pfu/ml) for each experimental animal found in scarification site (A) and secondary lesion swabs (B) throughout the study.
(A) The maximum viral load from the scarification site was 1.05X108 in an animal challenged with West African MPXV and 1.64X107 for an animal challenged with Congo Basin MPXV. No viable virus was found in sample days after day 27 post infection (p.i.) (B) Lower loads of viable virus were recovered from secondary lesion swabs during a shorter period of time (day 3 p.i. to 21 p.i.); the maximum viral load was 3.88X104 for an animal infected with Congo Basin MPXV and 6.27X103 for an animal infected with West Africa MPXV.
Fig 4.
Viable viral load (p.f.u./ml) for each experimental animal found in oral (A), nasal (B) and rectal swabs (C) throughout the study.
Higher viral loads were obtained from oral swabs than from rectal or nasal swabs. No viable virus was found in sample days after Day 27 post infection (p.i.).
Fig 5.
Average and maximum viral loads from MPXV challenged Cricetomys.
(A) Average viral load per individual sample type and experimental group at each sampling day; no viable virus was found in sample days after Day 27 post infection (p.i.). (B) Maximum and average viral load for each sample type and experimental group throughout the entire study. Error bars represent one standard deviation.
Fig 6.
Immune response in Cricetomys after MPXV challenge.
Absorbance values measured at 450nm from ELISA assays for both experimental groups: C-MPX (A) and W-MPX (B). No statistically significant difference was found between experimental groups (Wilcoxon signed test p-value = 0.3054). W-MPX 4 died on day 13 p.i., thus, no information is available for this animal after this day.