The Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a pan-continental public health organization, declared this Tuesday a continental emergency due to monkeypox (now known as mpox) and announced that in the coming weeks it will present a common response plan.
“Today we declare this public health emergency for continental security to mobilize our institutions, our collective will and our resources to act quickly and decisively,” said the director general of this organization, Jean Kaseya, in a telematic press conference collected by the France Press agency.
Kaseya urged the member states of the African Union, the body on which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention depends, to “fast track the emergency authorization for mpox, which will play a fundamental role in safeguarding public health and ensuring rapid access to life-saving interventions.”
The WHO will evaluate this Wednesday whether it is necessary to decree the highest level of international health alert
This announcement, which will allow in particular to release funds for access to vaccines and have a continental response, comes on the eve of the meeting of the emergency committee of the World Health Organization (WHO) to evaluate whether it is necessary to decree the most high level of international health alert against this disease.
Mpox is a viral disease that is transmitted from animals to humans, but is also transmitted through close physical contact with a person infected with the virus. Since January 2022, a total of 38,465 cases have been recorded in 16 African countries, with 1,456 deaths, including a 160% increase in cases in 2024 compared to the previous year, according to data published last week by the Centers for Control and Prevention from Africa.
The continent faces the spread of a new strain, detected in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in September 2023 and called Clade Ib, more deadly and more transmissible than the previous ones. Clade Ib causes rashes to appear all over the body, while previous strains were characterized by localized rashes and lesions on the mouth, face or genitals.
Mpox is transmitted from animals to humans and through close physical contact with a person infected with the virus.
Mpox was first discovered in humans in 1970 in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire), with the spread of the Clade I subtype, the new variant of which is a mutation, since then limited mainly to West African countries. and centrally, patients will generally be contaminated by infected animals.
In 2022, a global epidemic, transmitted by the Clade 2 subtype, spread to around a hundred countries where the disease was not endemic and mainly affected homosexual and bisexual men.
The WHO then decreed the maximum alert in July 2022 in the face of this outbreak of cases in the world, and lifted it less than a year later, in May 2023. The epidemic had caused about 140 deaths out of about 90,000 cases.
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