More than 50,000 people have so far been vaccinated against MPOX in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Rwanda, the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Friday.
The African Union's health agency warned on Thursday that the MPOX epidemic was "still not under control" and called for mobilization to avoid a "more serious pandemic" than Covid-19.
The majority of deaths have occurred in the DRC, the epicenter of the epidemic, which launched a vaccination campaign in early October.
"So far, more than 50,000 people have been vaccinated against MPOX in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda, thanks to donations from the United States and the European Commission," WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a news conference in Geneva.
Furthermore, he recalled, the WHO and its partners (Africa CDC, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), the Vaccine Alliance (Gavi) and UNICEF) have created "an access and allocation mechanism (called AMM) to promote equitable and rapid access to vaccines against mpox".
In this context, it has been decided for the moment that nearly 900,000 doses of vaccines will be allocated to nine countries, announced Dr. Tedros. The countries concerned were informed this Friday.
"This is the first allocation of nearly six million doses of vaccines that should be available by the end of 2024" through this mechanism, he said, thanking the countries and partners who donated the vaccines: Canada, the United States, the European Union and 12 of its member states, and Gavi.
More than 1,000 people have died from mpox in Africa, where some 48,000 cases have been recorded since January, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) said Thursday.
MPOX, formerly known as monkeypox, is a viral disease that spreads from animals to humans but is also transmitted between humans through prolonged physical contact, causing fever, muscle pain and skin lesions.
Two concurrent epidemics are raging in Africa, one caused by clade 1a in central Africa, affecting mainly children, and another by the new variant, clade 1b, which affects adults but also children in another region, in the east of the DRC, and in neighboring countries.
Dr Tedros recalled that "vaccination is only one element" in the fight against the disease, stressing that "although screening rates have increased considerably this year, only 40 to 50% of suspected cases are tested in the DRC."
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