The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) launched a monthly mpox surveillance report on 17 June, having confirmed 336 clade I cases across 15 EU and European Economic Area (EEA) countries between April 2025 and March 20261. mpox is a viral disease caused by the monkeypox virus; clade I is the more severe of its two lineages, and the EEA extends EU single-market rules to Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein.
Local transmission, meaning chains with no link to travel from Africa, is now established in at least four countries: Spain, the Netherlands, Italy and Portugal, predominantly among men who have sex with men. Cases peaked at 89 in January 2026 and averaged around 80 a month in February and March. ECDC rates the risk to men who have sex with men as moderate and to the general population as low.
Clade Ib circulating locally in Europe was reported a fortnight ago, and the recombinant clade Ib/IIb virus before that, so the new bulletin formalises timing rather than marking a discovery. The transmission was already documented; what changes now is that ECDC commits to a standing monthly cadence to track it, an institutional rhythm arriving after the pattern it watches was established rather than before. A monthly report formalises monitoring of spread that European laboratories had been logging case by case for the better part of a year.
