WHO maintains the international emergency for the MPOX in the face of the growing number of cases

The World Health Organization (WHO) announced Thursday that it maintains the international health emergency for the MPOX (symptom smallpox) due to the increase in cases and areas in which they have been declared, including conflict zones such as the east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (RDC).

The CEO of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, announced this decision two days after the emergency committee for the disease, which meets every three months, analyzed the situation and recommended taking this measure to the head of the health agency.

The Committee also reviewed the temporary recommendations to deal with the outbreaks of this disease, which include the establishment of national and local emergency centers, intensify the monitoring of cases and contacts with them and develop vaccination plans, without proposing for the moment trip restrictions.

The emergency was declared on August 14, 2024, given the increase in cases especially in the RDC, where some areas with outbreaks are difficult to access for health services due to the conflict in provinces such as Kivu del Norte and Kivu del Sur.

The current alert of the International Health Agency for the MPOX responds to the rapid expansion in Africa of a new variant (CLADO IB), different from the one that caused another outbreak in Africa in 2022 and thousands of cases in Europe, North America and countries in other regions.

More than 2,100 confirmed cases of this IB variant in the RDC (compared to 13,000 last year), 1,500 in Uganda, about 500 in Burundi, 20 in Rwanda and nine in Kenya, according to WHO statistics, have been detected.

Only eleven of these cases have been mortal, all of them in Uganda, while last year 55 deaths were recorded in the affected African countries.

The less lethal variant of 2022 has already taken the WHO to a first declaration of the international health emergency, which raised the following year. EFE