The WHO emergency committee on MPOX will meet "as soon as possible" to assess whether to declare the highest level of alert in the face of the current epidemic in several African countries, the head of the organization announced on Wednesday.
"Given the spread of mpox outside the DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo) 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," said World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
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, also known as monkeypox, was first discovered in humans in 1970 in what is now the DRC (formerly Zaire), with the spread of subtype clade 1 (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.
In 2022, a global epidemic, carried by subtype clade 2, spread to about 100 countries where the disease was not endemic, affecting mainly homosexual and bisexual men.
The WHO then declared maximum alert in July 2022 in the face of this surge in cases worldwide, then lifted it less than a year later, in May 2023. The epidemic had caused some 140 deaths out of around 90,000 cases.
But the new strain of mpox, detected in the DRC in September 2023 and named "clade 1b", then reported in several neighboring countries, raises fears of a spread of this virus. The WHO is all the more concerned because clade 1b "causes a more severe disease than clade 2", observed Dr. Tedros.
"Since the beginning of the year, the DRC has been experiencing a serious epidemic of mpox, with more than 14,000 cases reported and 511 deaths," he detailed, adding that "the number of cases reported in the first six months of this year is equal to that of the whole of last year, and the virus has spread to provinces that were not affected before."
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In addition, Dr Tedros noted, "over the past month, some 50 confirmed cases and more suspected cases have been reported in four countries neighbouring the DRC that had never reported cases before: Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda."
He said clade 1b has been confirmed in Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda, while analyses are still ongoing for Burundi.
In the DRC, as of August 3, the African Union health agency Africa CDC (Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) counted 14,479 confirmed and suspected cases and 455 deaths, representing a lethality rate of approximately 3%.
WHO is working with governments of affected countries and other partners to understand and address the drivers of these outbreaks. “Stopping transmission will require a comprehensive response,” said Dr Tedros, stressing that WHO advises “not to impose travel restrictions to affected countries.”
The organization has developed a regional action plan that requires $15 million (€13.7 million) to support surveillance, preparedness and response activities.
“We need to be able to characterize these viruses, to really understand the epidemiology,” said Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO’s head of epidemic and pandemic preparedness. “Financial support is needed for MPOX. We need to scale up the response to deal with an outbreak in multiple countries, particularly for clade 1b.”
Dr. Tedros recalled that there are two vaccines against mpox and indicated that he hopes that they can be included on the WHO list of safe emergency tools in order to accelerate their distribution.
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