United States: Vaccines to address the rising mpox cases across the Democratic Republic of Congo and neighboring countries might not be available in the central African nation for many more months, even as the WHO weighs an invocation of the outbreak as an emergency by Africa’s top public health agency.
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The Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention made the historic first announcement of a public health emergency of continental significance. On Wednesday, a WHO-led consultative group will determine if it represents a global threat.
However, while such experts expected the meetings to spur action globally, there are still challenges, such as access to vaccines, funding, and competition from other diseases.
According to Jean-Jacques Muyembe-Tamfum, head of Congo’s Institut National pour la Recherche Biomedicale (INRB), “It is important to declare an emergency because the disease is spreading,” Reuters reported.
He said he would have liked any declaration to seek more funds to support surveillance in addition to helping access vaccines in Congo.
But he agreed that it would not be easy in a large country where health centers and humanitarian resources are strained by war and other diseases such as measles and cholera.
According to Emmanuel Nakoune, a mpox expert at the Institut Pasteur de Bangui in the Central African Republic, “If the big declarations remain just words, it won’t make any material difference.”
Announcement by Africa CDC
Last week, Africa CDC announced it had received USD 10.4 million in emergency funding from the Africa Union for its mpox response, and its director general, Jean Kaseya, said on Tuesday that there is a definite plan to source 3 million vaccine doses this year, Reuters reported.
However, sources involved in a vaccination roll-out plan in Congo said they would get only 65,000 doses in the short term, and campaigns would not start before October at the earliest.
More than 15,000 suspected mpox cases have been registered in Africa this year, and 461 deaths, the majority of which were children in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Africa CDC said. It is typically a relatively benign virus but can be fatal; it causes influenza-like symptoms, as well as the formation of pus-filled lesions.