While most people over 50 were likely vaccinated against smallpox — which may provide some protection against mpox — that is not the case for Africa’s mostly young population.
LONDON — The rising mpox outbreaks in Africa that triggered the World Health Organization’s emergency declaration are largely the result of decades of neglect and the global community’s inability to stop sporadic epidemics among a population with little immunity against the smallpox-related disease, leading African scientists said Tuesday.
“What we are witnessing in Africa now is different from the global outbreak in 2022,” he said. While that outbreak was overwhelmingly focused in gay and bisexual men, mpox in Africa is now being spread via sexual transmission as well as through close contact among children, pregnant women and other vulnerable groups.
Earlier this month, WHO declared the surging mpox outbreaks in Congo and 11 other countries in Africa to be a global emergency. Out of a total of 18,910 cases in 2024, 94% — or 17,794 — were in Congo, the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said, with 535 of the 541 deaths reported last week. Nearly 70% of mpox infections in Congo are in children under 15.
The mutations noted in the new form of mpox suggested it was “more adapted to human transmission,” he said, but the lack of tests in Congo and elsewhere were complicating efforts to monitor outbreaks. Marion Koopmans, a virologist at Erasmus Medical Centre in the Netherlands who has been studying mpox, said scientists were now seeing some significant impacts of the disease, noting that pregnant women were miscarrying or losing their fetuses and that some babies were being born infected with mpox, which was also leading to “severe outcomes.”
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