(Abidjan) Twenty-eight cases of mpox, including one death, have been recorded in Ivory Coast, AFP learned on Tuesday from the National Institute of Public Hygiene (INHP).
The INHP recorded “28 confirmed cases, including one death” in Abidjan as of August 20, said Dr. Daouda Coulibaly. A previous report on August 1er August reported 6 “non-fatal” cases.
“The situation is not alarming,” says Mr. Coulibaly, “we are at the beginning of a nascent epidemic, there is no outbreak.”
“Surveillance is reinforced,” he added, “we must break the chains of transmission, identify the contacts of cases, isolate them and follow them up.”
If the first cases of MPOX identified this year in Ivory Coast corresponded to the strain of the previous global epidemic which occurred in 2022, clade 2, “analyses are underway” to find that of the new cases.
Because in parallel with a resurgence of cases of MPOX in Africa, a new, more transmissible and more deadly variant, clade 1b, emerged in September in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
All strains combined, the DRC is by far the most affected country, with at least 16,000 cases, including 548 deaths.
Cases of clade 1b have also been detected in other East African countries and one in Sweden.
The resurgence of MPOX in Africa prompted the World Health Organization (WHO) to declare a public health emergency of international concern on August 14, its highest level of health alert, already triggered in 2022.
Formerly called monkeypox, the virus was discovered in humans in 1970 in the DRC with the spread of the clade 1 subtype, of which the new variant is a mutation.