The call for help that Africa launched in August in response to the health emergency posed by mpox has so far resulted in a trickle of vaccines that have begun to arrive in recent days in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC): almost 100,000 doses from the European Commission’s Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Authority. last day 5thand 100,000 more, from the same origin, whose arrival is scheduled for the next few days. The United States sent 50,000 doses to Kinshasa on Tuesday; and Gavi, the international consortium for immunization, sent the same day another 15,000. Africa needs at least 10 million dosesaccording to the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the continent’s highest health authority.
But rich countries are still hoarding hundreds of millions of doses of vaccines that could help combat this outbreak, according to A recent investigation published by the Reuters agencybased on public statements, documents and estimates from non-governmental organizations. Countries such as Japan, the United States and Canada “have been stockpiling these vaccines for years in case smallpox (…) reappears.” Some of the vaccines, the agency points out, were used outside Africa in 2022, when smallpox spread around the world.
Cristina Jauset, head of vaccines and epidemic response at Médecins Sans Frontières, explains in an audio to this newspaper: “With 250,000 doses we cannot start a vaccination campaign: it makes no sense to start and then stop the campaign practically the next day.” “It is good that the distribution of vaccines has begun, but they are not enough,” confirms Katharina von Schroeder, director of advocacy, communication and campaigns at Save the Children in the Congo, in a telephone conversation with this newspaper from the DRC.
The lessons of the last pandemic are at risk of being forgotten, warns WHO. “The Covid-19 pandemic illustrated the need for international coordination to promote equitable access to these tools, so that they can be used most effectively where they are most needed. We urge countries with stocks of vaccines and other products to make donations to prevent infections, stop transmission and save lives,” He stated the director general of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
For the moment, the international community has committed to sending to Africa 3.66 million doses against monkeypox, according to CDC sources, including three million immunizations announced by Japan (the largest donor so far) or 315,000 from Team European international cooperation instrument composed of the EU, the Twenty-Seven and their development banks.
“Vaccines are useless on the shelves. Why wouldn’t we get them to the people who need them right now?” he told Reuters Maria Van Kerkhove, acting head of pandemic prevention at the World Health Organization (WHO). According to the official, “[el reparto de vacunas] It is not a technical issue, but a political one.”
Since the beginning of the year, the DRC, the epicentre of the disease, has reported more than 4,901 confirmed cases of mpox and more than 629 deaths from the disease. This is the largest outbreak of the disease in the African country, which is struggling with a lack of infrastructure, scarce resources for diagnosis of the disease and widespread poverty and insecurity following a long military conflict.
One crisis upon another
The situation is particularly precarious in camps for displaced people – some 6.9 million people have been forced from their homes in one of Africa’s most serious internal displacement crises – where overcrowded and with no regular access to doctors, those affected often face stigma and fear of infection. Many of those infected are already in poor physical condition, which can lead to more serious, even fatal, illness, says Katharina von Schroeder of Save the Children in DRC. “This is one crisis on top of another,” she sums up. “We are seeing many of the child deaths from MPOX linked to malnutrition. This disease is a major cause of death in children, and it is a cause of death in children.” [la mpox] “wouldn’t kill so much in other countries.”
Rising rates of acute malnutrition in this country have led to 4.5 million children under five years old and more than 3.7 million pregnant and lactating women are at increased risk of contracting and dying from MPOX, according to the NGO. The distribution of MPOX vaccines, adds Von Schroeder, is further complicated by poor road communication within the country.
The outbreak does not only require vaccination, experts say. “Preventive measures for health personnel are also important,” says Jauset, from Doctors Without Borders, and the correct diagnosis of cases. “There is a problem in identifying cases: only about a quarter of patients in the DRC are tested and sent to a laboratory,” he stresses.
The current outbreak of mpox spreading across Africa, with a new variant (clade 1b), differs from the one that occurred in Europe in 2022 in its mode of transmission. If in Europe the majority of infections occurred in sexual relations between adults, now, 70% of new cases are mainly among children. Although initially there was talk of a more dangerous and transmissible variant, more and more experts are questioning some of these hypotheses.
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