The World Health Organisation today declared the mpox outbreak in Africa a global health emergency, with confirmed cases among children and adults in more than a dozen countries and a new variant circulating.
Earlier this week, the African Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) announced that the mpox outbreak was a public health emergency, with more than 500 confirmed deaths, calling for international help to stop the spread of the virus.
‘This is something that should concern us all… The potential for a spread beyond Africa is very worrying,’ said the director general of the World Health Organisation (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, according to the Associated Press (AP).
The African continent has few vaccines available at the moment.
The director-general of the WHO had already announced today that he had extended the permanent recommendations against the chronic risk of the mpox virus in several African countries by one year, following the new outbreak.
‘I have decided to extend the standing recommendations for another year to help countries respond to the chronic risk of smallpox,’ Ghebreyesus said at the WHO emergency committee meeting on the new outbreak of so-called “monkeypox” in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRCongo), but also in Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda, which until now had reported no cases of the disease.
CDC Africa said that mpox has been detected in 13 countries this year, and that more than 96 per cent of cases and deaths are in Congo.
The number of cases has risen by 160% and deaths by 19% compared to the same period last year. So far more than 14,000 cases have been recorded and 524 people have died.
‘We are now in a situation where mpox poses a risk to many more neighbours in and around Central Africa,’ said Salim Abdool Karim, a South African infectious disease specialist who chairs the CDC Africa emergency group.
According to the expert, the new variant of the virus coming from Congo appears to have a mortality rate of around 3 to 4 per cent.
During the global outbreak of mpox in 2022, which affected more than 70 countries, less than 1% of those infected died.
According to CDC Africa, almost 70 per cent of cases in Congo are children under the age of 15, who also account for 85 per cent of deaths.
Jacques Alonda, an epidemiologist working in Congo with international solidarity organisations, said that he and other experts are particularly concerned about the spread of mpox in refugee camps in the eastern part of the country.
‘The most serious case I witnessed was that of a six-week-old baby who contracted mpox when he was just two weeks old. He was infected because overcrowding in the hospital meant that the baby and his mother had to share a room with someone who had the virus, but was undiagnosed,’ said Alonda, who said that the child has been in the care of the international organisations she works with for a month.
Save the Children said that the Congolese health system was already ‘collapsing’ due to cases of malnutrition, measles and cholera.
The WHO director-general said that the authorities were facing outbreaks of mpox in several countries with ‘different modes of transmission and different levels of risk’.
The UN agency said that mpox was recently identified for the first time in four East African countries: Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda. All these outbreaks are linked to one in Congo. In Ivory Coast and South Africa, health authorities reported outbreaks of a different, less dangerous strain of the virus, which spread globally in 2022.
Earlier this year, scientists had reported the emergence of a new form of a more lethal strain of mpox, which can kill up to 10 per cent of those infected, detected in a mining town in Congo, fearing that it could spread more easily.
Mpox is transmitted mainly through close contact with infected people, including sexually.
Unlike previous outbreaks, where lesions were mainly visible on the chest, hands and feet, the new strain causes mild symptoms and lesions on the genitals, making it harder to identify, which means that people can infect others without knowing they are infected.
In 2022, the WHO declared mpox a global emergency after it spread to more than 70 countries that had no history of contact with the virus until then, affecting mainly gay and bisexual men.
Before that, the disease was mainly detected in occasional outbreaks in central and western Africa when people came into contact with infected wild animals.
Western countries have contained the outbreak and spread of the virus with the help of vaccines and treatment to which Africa has virtually no access.
The Congolese authorities have requested four million vaccines against mpox, mainly to inoculate children and young people up to the age of 18, and the United States and Japan have positioned themselves to supply these vaccines to Congo, Cris Kacita Osako, from the mpox response committee in Congo, told AP.
Lusa
