The rising mpox outbreaks in Africa that triggered the World Health Organization’s emergency declaration are largely the result of decades of neglect and the global community’s inability to stop sporadic epidemics among a population with little immunity against the smallpox-related disease, leading African scientists said Tuesday.
According to Dr. Dimie Ogoina, who chaired WHO’s mpox emergency committee, negligence had led to a new, more transmissible version of the virus emerging in countries with few resources to stop outbreaks.
Mpox, also known as monkeypox, had been spreading mostly undetected for years in Nigeria and elsewhere before the disease prompted the 2022 outbreak in more than 70 countries, Ogoina said at a virtual news conference.
“What we are witnessing in Africa now is different from the global outbreak in 2022,” he said. While that outbreak was overwhelmingly focused in gay and bisexual men, mpox in Africa is now being spread via sexual transmission as well as through close contact among children, pregnant women and other vulnerable groups.
And while most people over 50 were likely vaccinated against smallpox — which may provide some protection against mpox — that is not the case for Africa’s mostly young population, who Ogoina said were mostly susceptible.
Mpox belongs to the same family of viruses as smallpox but causes milder symptoms like fever, chills and body aches. It mostly spreads through close skin-to-skin contact, including sex. People with more serious cases can develop prominent blisters on the face, hands, chest and genitals.
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Earlier this month, WHO declared the surging mpox outbreaks in Congo and 11 other countries in Africa to be a global emergency. Out of a total of 18,910 cases in 2024, 94 per cent— or 17,794 — were in Congo, the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said, with 535 of the 541 deaths reported last week. Nearly 70 per cent of mpox infections in Congo are in children under 15.
Dr. Placide Mbala-Kingebeni, a Congolese scientist who helped identify the newest version of mpox, said diagnostic tests being used in the country did not always pick it up, making it hard to track the variant’s spread.
In May, Mbala-Kingebeni, who heads a lab at Congo’s National Institute for Biomedical Research, published research showing a new form of mpox that may be less deadly but more transmissible.
The mutations noted in the new form of mpox suggested it was “more adapted to human transmission,” he said, but the lack of tests in Congo and elsewhere were complicating efforts to monitor outbreaks.
The new variant has been detected in four other African countries as well as Sweden, where health officials said they have identified the first case of a person this month with the more infectious form of mpox. The person had been infected during a stay in Africa.
WHO said that available data to date does not suggest that the new form of mpox is more dangerous but that research is ongoing.
Marion Koopmans, a virologist at Erasmus Medical Centre in the Netherlands who has been studying mpox, said scientists were now seeing some significant impacts of the disease, noting that pregnant women were miscarrying or losing their fetuses and that some babies were being born infected with mpox, which was also leading to “severe outcomes.”
Ogoina, a professor of infectious diseases at Niger Delta University in Nigeria, said that in the absence of vaccines and drugs, African health workers should focus on providing supportive care, like ensuring patients have enough to eat and are given mental health support, given the stigma that often comes with mpox.
“It’s very, very unfortunate that we have had mpox for 54 years and we are only now thinking about therapeutics,” he said.
Mbala-Kingebeni said strategies previously used to stop Ebola outbreaks in Africa might help, given the limited numbers of shots expected. He said authorities have estimated Africa needs about 10 million doses but might only receive about 500,000 — and it’s unclear when they might arrive.
“Finding a case and vaccinating around the case, like we did with Ebola, might help us target the hot spots,” he said.
On Tuesday, WHO issued an appeal for $87.4 million for the next six months that it said was needed to stop the spread of mpox. The agency previously said that past efforts to raise money for mpox did not elicit a single donor dollar.
© 2024 The Canadian Press