New pandemic in sight? An increase in cases of MPox (the official name for monkeypox) in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has just set off alarm bells at the World Health Organization (WHO), or a emergency committee was convened to determine whether a public health emergency of international concern should be declared.
This infectious disease, endemic in Africa, had already worried the whole world in 2022, when a global epidemic outbreak caused more than 100,000 infections in around 100 countries, including nearly 3,000 cases in France.
Since then, this virus has continued to circulate quietly across the African continent, but without ever causing as much alarm as it is now. So, why so much concern? Here's what we know about this new epidemic outbreak.
A new, more dangerous strain of the virus
The first cause for concern is that these new infections in Africa are not due to the same strain that swept the globe in 2022, but to a new, more dangerous one.
In an article published in Nature Medicine On June 13, 2024, researchers at the National Institute of Biomedical Research in Kinshasa, DRC, sequenced the viruses collected from 22 of these patients. They demonstrated that this is a distinct strain from those previously known, and that it belongs to clade 1, which is more dangerous than clade 2 (responsible in particular for the 2022 epidemic). This new strain is now called 1b.
An explosion of cases in the DRC that spills over into neighboring countries
According to the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, there were approximately 37,000 cases of COPD on the continent between January 2022 and August 2024, spread across 15 African countries. More than a third of these (nearly 14,000) occurred in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2024 alone.
An unprecedented outbreak that would indicate greater contagiousness of the virus and which has reached Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda, neighboring countries that had never previously reported cases of CoV.
Transmission mainly through sexual contact
This high transmissibility is mainly due to infections during sexual intercourse, particularly affecting sex workers and their clients.
This is the first time that sexual transmission between adults has been the main driver of a COPD epidemic. Normally, this virus primarily affects children (under 15 years old). This could indicate a higher transmissibility during unprotected sex compared to previous strains.
Higher mortality than in previous outbreaks
Of these nearly 14,000 cases in the DRC, 450 have died from the virus. A mortality rate of approximately 31%, higher than that of previous epidemic outbreaks.
For example, the 2022 epidemic outbreak that affected 116 countries worldwide, including France, caused the death of 208 people out of nearly 100,000 confirmed infections, for a mortality rate of 0.2%, less than 10 times lower than the current strain in the DRC.
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