A The WHO meeting is taking place in Geneva, a day after the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) declared a “public health emergency” over the Mpox virus epidemic on the continent.
The meeting was called by WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus following the resurgence of Mpox this year.
A new strain (“clade 1b”) was detected in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRCongo) in September 2023 and then reported in several neighboring countries.
This strain “causes more serious diseases than clade 2”, according to the WHO official.
Smallpox 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.
Since January 2022, 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 Africa CDC.
Mpox was first discovered in humans in 1970 in present-day DR Congo (formerly Zaire), with the spread of the Clade I subtype (of which the new variant is a mutation), which has since been mainly confined to countries in West and Central Africa, where patients are usually infected by infected animals.
In 2022, a worldwide epidemic of clade 2 subtype spread to a hundred countries where the disease was not endemic, mainly affecting homosexual and bisexual men.
The WHO declared a high alert in July 2022 in response to this global outbreak, but lifted it less than a year later, in May 2023. The epidemic has caused around 140 deaths out of an estimated total of 90,000 cases.
Read Also: Mpox cases in newborns increase in DR Congo. Hospitals at their limit
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Source: https://www.noticiasaominuto.com/mundo/2615091/oms-reune-hoje-comite-de-urgencia-para-avaliar-epidemia-do-mpox-em-africa
