WHO declares Mpox outbreaks in Africa a global health emergency: Fears raised virus which has killed 500 people could spread worldwide
The World Health Organisation has declared the mpox outbreaks in Africa a global emergency, with cases confirmed among children and adults in more than a dozen countries and a new form of the virus spreading.
Earlier this week, the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention announced that the mpox outbreaks were a public health emergency, with more than 500 deaths, and called for international help to stop the virus' spread.
'This is something that should concern us all ... The potential for further spread beyond Africa and beyond is very worrying,' said WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
The Africa CDC previously said that mpox, formerly known as monkeypox, has been detected in 13 countries this year, and that more than 96% of all cases and deaths are in Congo. Cases are up 160% and deaths are up 19% compared with the same period last year.
So far, there have been more than 14,000 cases and 524 people have died.
'We are now in a situation where (mpox) poses a risk to many more neighbors in and around central Africa,' said Salim Abdool Karim, a South African infectious diseases expert who chairs the Africa CDC emergency group.
He said that the new version of mpox spreading from Congo appears to have a death rate of about 3-4 per cent.
During the global 2022 mpox outbreak that affected more than 70 countries, fewer than 1 per cent of people died.
The United States reported as many as 32,063 cases during the outbreak, with 58 deaths during the period as cases were reported in significant numbers in North, Central and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia and Australasia.
The new 'clade' of the disease, known as Clade 1b, has been reported to have a mortality rate in children as high as ten per cent.
Experts have also warned the disease appears more infectious, and presents with more severe symptoms.
Despite the visibility of the disease, health authorities have been powerless to stop the spread without efficient checks or vaccines.
Zeil Rosenberg MD, executive Vice President of Tonix Pharmaceuticals, a company currently developing an mpox vaccine, told MailOnline earlier this month that the disease is now spreading to regions where historically it has not been endemic.
'The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) remains the centre of an unchecked explosion of cases with 11,000 cases reported this year alone and showing no signs of slowing,' he warned.
'There are a number of challenges in controlling this outbreak,' Brian Labus, Assistant Professor at the University of Nevada Las Vegas' Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, told MailOnline.
'We have seen spread in camps for displaced persons, where high population density increases the risk of infectious disease spread.'
He warned that the virus has mutated and now spreads more easily between people.
'While we can prevent the disease with vaccines, none are currently available in the affected areas.
'When you add these problems to the routine challenges of controlling disease in remote, low-resource environments, it has been very difficult to get the outbreak under control.'
Michael Marks, a professor of medicine at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said declaring the mpox outbreaks in Africa an emergency is warranted if that might lead to more support to contain them.
'It's a failure of the global community that things had to get this bad to release the resources needed,' he said.
Officials at the Africa CDC said nearly 70% of cases in Congo are in children younger than 15, who also accounted for 85% of deaths.
Jacques Alonda, an epidemiologist working in Congo with international charities, said he and other experts were particularly worried about the spread of mpox in camps for refugees in the country's conflict-ridden east.
'The worst case I've seen is that of a six-week-old baby who was just two weeks old when he contracted mpox,' Alonda said, adding the baby has been in their care for a month.
'He got infected because hospital overcrowding meant he and his mother were forced to share a room with someone else who had the virus, which was undiagnosed.'
Save the Children said Congo's health system already had been 'collapsing' under the strain of malnutrition, measles and cholera.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said officials were facing several outbreaks of mpox outbreaks in various countries with 'different modes of transmission and different levels of risk.'
The U.N. health agency said mpox was recently identified for the first time in four East African countries: Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda. All of those outbreaks are linked to the one in Congo. In the Ivory Coast and South Africa, health authorities have reported outbreaks of a different and less dangerous version of mpox that spread worldwide in 2022.
Earlier this year, scientists reported the emergence of a new form of the deadlier form of mpox, which can kill up to 10% of people, in a Congolese mining town that they feared might spread more easily. Mpox mostly spreads via close contact with infected people, including through sex.
Unlike in previous mpox outbreaks, where lesions were mostly seen on the chest, hands and feet, the new form causes milder symptoms and lesions on the genitals. That makes it harder to spot, meaning people might also sicken others without knowing they're infected.
In 2022, WHO declared mpox to be a global emergency after it spread to more than 70 countries that had not previously reported mpox, mostly affecting gay and bisexual men.
Before that outbreak, the disease had mostly been seen in sporadic outbreaks in central and West Africa when people came into close contact with infected wild animals.
The more lethal Clade Ib variant appears to be transmissible through close non-sexual contact, and exacerbated by heterosexual sexual contact, 'particularly among sex workers, who account for about 30 per cent of recorded cases'.
Authorities in the DR Congo desperately approved mpox vaccines to try to contain the outbreak in June, passing 1,000 deaths from 20,000 cases within the past year, but many worry the affected nations lack the resources to effectively stop the spread in its tracks.
Marks of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine said that in the absence of mpox vaccines licensed in the West, officials could consider inoculating people against smallpox, a related disease.
'We need a large supply of vaccine so that we can vaccinate populations most at risk,' he said, adding that would mean sex workers, children and adults living in outbreak regions.
Congolese authorities said they have asked for 4 million doses of mpox vaccine, Cris Kacita Osako, coordinator of Congo's Monkeypox Response Committee, told The Associated Press. Osako said those would mostly be used for children under 18.
'The United States and Japan are the two countries that positioned themselves to give vaccines to our country,' Osako said.
Although WHO's emergency declaration is meant to spur donor agencies and countries into action, the global response to previous emergency designations has been mixed.
Dr. Boghuma Titanji, an infectious diseases expert at Emory University, said the last WHO emergency declaration for mpox 'did very little to move the needle' on getting things like diagnostic tests, medicines and vaccines to Africa.
'The world has a real opportunity here to act in a decisive manner and not repeat past mistakes, (but) that will take more than an (emergency) declaration,' Titanji said.
