ALBANY — Students, administrators and professors heading back to New York’s colleges and universities for the fall semester have to contend with a new worry: the fact that New York is the epicenter of the nation’s monkeypox outbreak.

As of Tuesday, with dozens of new cases being reported each day in New York, the state had recorded 2,620 cases of monkeypox to date. That total represents about 20% of the 12,689 cases documented nationally.

Living in close quarters in residence halls, dormitories or fraternities, creates risk when any communicable disease is being transmitted, health experts say. While the most common cause of monkeypox transmission is sex between men, it can also be spread by close contact with contaminated bedding, towels and linen, experts say.

“We should all be concerned about this virus and how it is being spread right now,” said Dr. Nancy Nielsen of the Jacobs School of Science and Medicine at the University at Buffalo.

While the monkeypox virus does not spread with the ease that COVID-19 does, and usually involves contact with the kind of skin lesions acquired through sexual contact, there are other risk factors, Nielsen said.

“You can also get it from hugging,” Nielsen said. “You can get it from touching linens or towels that were used by the person with skin lesions.”

Physical contact from participating in sports carries risks, as well, the physician noted, identifying wrestling as one such athletic activity.

On Aug. 4, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra issued a declaration that the monkeypox outbreak is a national emergency, allowing the government to mobilize more resources to deal with the contagion. The last time the federal government had declared a public health emergency was in January 2020 in response to the coronavirus.

Nielsen said monkeypox had mainly been confined to Africa before this year. Now the U.S. outbreak is the largest in the world.

“It should be on everybody’s radar screen,” Nielsen said, suggesting that anyone with a skin lesion — adult or child — be examined by a physician.

Another challenge in dealing with the outbreak, she added, has been the national shortage of the monkeypox vaccine.

Countries around the globe have been focused on getting one vaccine — Imvanex, often referred to as JYNNEOS, which has been approved by the U.S. FDA for monkeypox and smallpox. But the only company producing it is Denmark-based Bavarian Nordic.

According to state officials, New York labs that can test samples for the presence of the monkeypox virus include the state Wadsworth Center in Albany County, the New York City Department Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, and several private labs, including LabCorp, Mayo Clinic, Aegis Sciences Corporation, Sonic Healthcare, and UR Medicine Lab.

At the State University central administration office, which oversees the 64-campus system, spokeswoman Holly Liapis said officials are reviewing updated guidance on the virus from the Centers for Disease Control.

“Our campuses are fully prepared to quickly put in place the necessary health and safety protocols, and we will remain in close communication with leadership across the system to provide accurate data and dispel misinformation, “ Lisapis said.

SUNY announced in 2020 that SUNY and Syracuse University researchers had teamed up in a project using wastewater surveillance to gauge the spread of coronavirus. SUNY provided no immediate information Tuesday as to whether its protocols for dealing with monkeypox will entail wastewater surveillance.

Last week, officials at the University of California at San Diego announced they were using the same wastewater surveillance equipment used for COVID-19 detection in new monkeypox surveillance efforts, describing it as a “relatively simple add-on.”

Rob Knight, director of the Center for Microbiome Innovation at the San Diego campus, was quoted in a campus announcement as stating: “It’s the same process as SARS-CoV-2 qPCR monitoring, except that we have been testing for a different virus. Monkeypox is a DNA virus, so it is a bit of a surprise that our process optimized for SARS-CoV-2, which is an RNA virus, works so well.”