The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) hopes to receive the first doses of vaccines against the mpox epidemic next week in a country where the disease has already caused at least 570 deaths, the health minister said on Monday.
The most affected country, the DRC, has recorded 16,700 cases, "with a little over 570 people dying" since the beginning of the year, indicated Minister Samuel-Roger Kamba during a press conference.
"We have two countries basically that have promised us vaccines. The first country is Japan. And the second country is the United States of America," he said.
A country of around one hundred million inhabitants, the DRC "plans to vaccinate 4 million people including 3.5 million children," added this source.
"I hope that next week we could already see the vaccines arriving (...) Our strategic vaccination response plan is already ready, we are just waiting for the vaccines to arrive," the minister insisted.
The disease "affects more and more young people. And we have a lot of children under 15 who are affected," he said.
The current epidemic is characterized by a more contagious and dangerous virus, with an estimated mortality rate of 3.6%.
The resurgence of MPOX in the DRC, which also affects Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda, prompted the World Health Organization (WHO) to trigger its highest level of alert at the international level on Wednesday.
The DRC is the focus and epicentre of the current outbreak, with the spread of a more dangerous strain of the virus causing growing concern in Africa and beyond.
Outside Africa, cases of MPOX have been diagnosed in Sweden, Pakistan and the Philippines.
Formerly called monkeypox, the virus was discovered in 1958 in Denmark, in monkeys raised for research. Then in 1970 for the first time in humans in what is now the DRC (formerly Zaire).
MPOX is a viral disease that spreads from animals to humans but is also transmitted through close physical contact. The disease causes fever, muscle pain and skin lesions.
"Do not eat the meat of dead animals, do not touch sick animals, because this is also a way of becoming contaminated," said Minister Kamba.
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