(Nairobi) The African Union’s health agency Africa CDC (Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) will “likely” declare a “public health emergency” next week over the ongoing Mpox outbreak in several African countries, its director announced on Thursday.
A new strain of Mpox, also called monkeypox, detected in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in September 2023 and then reported in several neighboring countries, raises fears of a spread of this virus.
This declaration of “public health emergency”, which will take place “probably” next week, is a first for the Africa CDC “since this mandate was entrusted to us in 2023”, Jean Kaseya, its director, told journalists.
The decision of the continental agency, which will notably make it possible to release funds and have a continental response, comes the day after the announcement by the World Health Organization (WHO) of a meeting “as soon as possible” of the emergency committee to assess whether to declare the highest level of alert in the face of the epidemic.
“Given the spread of Mpox outside the DRC and the possibility of further international spread within and outside Africa, I have decided to convene an emergency committee […] “to advise me on whether the outbreak constitutes a public health emergency of international concern,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Wednesday.
This qualification is the highest alert that the WHO can trigger and it is the head of the WHO who can launch it on the advice of the committee.
Mpox was first discovered in humans in 1970 in what is now the DRC (formerly Zaire), with the spread of the clade 1 subtype (of which the new variant is a mutation), mainly limited since then to countries in western and central Africa, with patients generally being contaminated by infected animals.