The World Health Organization declared a global health emergency on Wednesday, a long-debated step, after an outbreak of monkeypox, commonly known as MPOX, broke out in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and began spreading to neighboring African countries.
“This should concern all of us.” said “The potential for further spread of the virus within Africa and beyond is of great concern,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.
The WHO recommendation was made by the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) Declared Monkeypox is a continental public health emergency.
The Africa CDC said it took action after the virus was detected in 13 African countries, leading to a 160% increase in infections and a 19% increase in deaths compared to last year.
Doctors say the strain of monkeypox currently circulating in Africa is Much more dangerous That’s higher than the strain that briefly sparked a global health panic in 2022. The Africa CDC said 70% of the cases detected in the Democratic Republic of Congo were in children under 15, and 85% of the deaths were in the same age group. Infectious disease experts said children in other parts of the world probably wouldn’t experience such high infection and death rates because African children are more likely to be malnourished and susceptible to disease.
The new virus is also harder to detect. Previous versions of the virus caused large, disfiguring lesions on the chest, hands, and feet of infected individuals, but the new, more dangerous virus has milder symptoms and lesions are concentrated on the genitals, making it more difficult for patients and doctors to identify the infection. While there have been very few deaths from the virus in 2022, the mortality rate from the new virus could be as high as 4%.
The WHO said new cases in Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda, despite efforts to contain the spread of the disease in Congo, were among the triggers for declaring a Global Health Emergency. Last week, a traveller from Africa arrived in Sweden with a case of the new MPOX variant.
Meanwhile, the “old” type of monkeypox still exists, and has seen recent surges in infections in South Africa and Côte d’Ivoire.
A global health emergency is the highest level of alert for the WHO. The last global health emergency was declared during the previous monkeypox outbreak in July 2022, and the one before that was during the novel coronavirus first identified in Wuhan, China.
The designation is not used often, and while in theory it should bring increased attention from health officials around the world and more funding for disease prevention, in practice it doesn’t necessarily make a big difference, according to Dr. Bogma Titanj, an infectious disease expert at Emory University. said The Associated Press reported Thursday.
Some experts thought it prudent to declare the highest level of emergency in Congo to step up efforts to contain the disease, including expanding funding for disease prevention and vaccination, because there is great concern that MPOX could hit the region’s crowded refugee camps and spark a deadly epidemic.
The new mpox strain has not yet spread outside of Africa, except to a few travelers, such as those in Sweden, but if it becomes widespread worldwide, it could pose a bigger problem than the older strain. Recently developed Certain mutations allow the virus to spread more quickly between humans, and infectious disease experts speculate that these mutations arose as MPOX spread among sex workers in the Congo and their clients.
The Democratic Republic of Congo’s government has so far approved two vaccines for use against new monkeypox outbreaks: a Japanese product called LC16 and a vaccine called Jynneos made by Danish pharmaceutical company Bayern Nordic.
Bavarian Nordic Donated The company has supplied 200,000 doses of Jynneos to the Congo epidemic and said Thursday it could provide another 10 million once funding is available. The company said it would ship another 300,000 doses immediately, with 2 million by the end of 2024, to meet the needs of 10 million Congolese doctors by the end of 2025.
“We have the inventory, we have the capacity. What we lack are orders,” Bavarian Nordic CEO Paul Chaplin said on Thursday.
“We’re already in late August so we really need speed in decision-making to make this happen,” Chaplin added.
During the MPOX epidemic in 2022, Jynneos was effectively used, and LC16 was Introduced Japan saw an outbreak of MPOX near the end of a previous crisis, and while Japan has reported only two cases of MPOX in 2022, manufacturer KM Biologics said it has received “several inquiries from overseas” about the freeze-dried vaccine.
Tim Nguyen, WHO head of preparedness said He said at a briefing on Wednesday that while the LC16 is currently “not commercially available,” Japan has developed a “substantial” stockpile for after the 2022 epidemic.
