Photo: Fabrice Coffrini Agence France-Presse WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus
Agnès Pedrero – Agence France-Presse in Geneva
Published at 1:11 p.m. Updated at 6:45 p.m.
- Africa
The World Health Organization on Wednesday issued its highest level of international alert in the face of a resurgence of cases of mpox in Africa.
“Today the emergency committee met and informed me that in their view the situation constitutes a public health emergency of international concern. “I accepted that advice,” WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a news conference.
The WHO made the same decision in July 2022, when a mpox outbreak spread across the world, before lifting it in May 2023.
The 15 members of the emergency committee “all” considered that the criteria were met to declare an international public health emergency in the face of the rise in cases in Africa, said the chair of the ad hoc expert group, Professor Dimie Ogoina.
“Many members of the emergency committee are of the view that what is happening in Africa is actually the tip of the iceberg, that the challenge is bigger and that because of the weaknesses in the health system, we do not have a full picture of the burden of mpox,” he said, calling for increased surveillance and highlighting the lack of vaccines.
The African Union’s health agency had already declared a “public health emergency,” its highest level of alert, over the growing mpox outbreak on the continent, issuing a “clear call to action” to halt its spread.
A total of 38,465 cases of the disease, formerly known as monkeypox, have been reported in 16 African countries since January 2022, 1,456 deaths, including a 160% increase in cases in 2024 compared to the previous year, according to data released last week by the health agency Africa CDC.
200% Deposit Bonus up to €3,000 180% First Deposit Bonus up to $20,000“WHO is committed, in the days and weeks ahead, to coordinating the global response, working closely with each of the affected countries and leveraging its presence on the ground, to prevent transmission, treat infected people and save lives,” Dr. Tedros told reporters.
At the opening of the committee meeting, he highlighted the complexity of the situation with “several different outbreaks” in several countries, “with different modes of transmission and different levels of risk.”
“Over the past month, approximately 90 cases of clade [group] 1b were reported in four countries neighboring the DRC that had never reported mpox before: Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda,” Dr. Tedros recalled to the emergency committee.
“Not easy”
Declaring a global high alert “may allow WHO to access funds for emergency response. For the rest, the same priorities remain: investing in diagnostic capacity, public health response, treatment support and vaccination. This will not be easy,” according to Marion Koopmans, professor at the Netherlands’ Erasmus University Rotterdam.
“The International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations [IFPMA] is deeply concerned about the increasing number of cases of mpox in the African region,” said its director general, David Reddy.
MPox is a viral disease that spreads from animals to humans but is also transmitted through close physical contact with a person infected with the virus.
By 2022, the global epidemic, carried by clade 2, had spread to about a hundred countries where the disease was not endemic, mainly affecting homosexual and bisexual men. The epidemic had caused some 140 deaths out of about 90,000 cases.
The current epidemic, which started in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and is currently contained in Africa, has its specificities, firstly a more contagious and dangerous virus. It is caused by clade 1 and by an even more dangerous variant, clade 1b. Its mortality rate is estimated at 3.6%.
Clade 1b causes rashes all over the body, while previous strains were characterized by localized rashes and lesions, on the mouth, face or genitals.
According to Professor Ogoina, most of the deaths in the DRC are children. “We are also seeing a trend towards heterosexual transmission of mpox,” he said.
MPox was first discovered in humans in 1970 in what is now the DRC (formerly Zaire), with the spread of clade 1 since then mainly limited to countries in western and central Africa, with patients usually being infected by infected animals.