Starting date: June 2022

End date: September 2022

MOVIE is a prospective observational study aimed at describing the time to viral clearance in patients with Monkeypox. We conducted a prospective diagnostic accuracy evaluation in individuals with suspected Monkeypox in three centres in Spain.

Results

This is the first study to demonstrate the feasibility and accuracy of self-collected samples for the diagnosis of Monkeypox. Overall, self-collected swabs had high accuracy and similar viral loads to physician-collected swabs. Self-sampling for the diagnosis of sexually transmitted infections utilising self-taken pharyngeal, genital, and rectal swabs is a well-established strategy for diagnosing chlamydia and gonorrhoea based on nucleic acid amplification testing. Our data extend these findings to confirm the applicability of this strategy in Monkeypox. Importantly, we show patient-collected samples from skin lesions to have similarly high-performance characteristics. Unlike the other types of samples, patient-collected skin swabs are not routinely used to diagnose common blistering skin diseases such as herpes or varicella, but our data demonstrate the applicability of this approach.