Mpox is continuing to spread across the continent, with the first three cases being reported in Ethiopia last week and the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) saying another 6.4m vaccines are needed to deal with the outbreak.
Three-quarters of Africa’s confirmed new cases are in Sierra Leone, with 648 confirmed cases in the past week. Yet the country only has around 10 000 vaccine doses, reports Health Policy Watch, and will need millions more within the next few months.
Dr Ngashi Ngongo, Africa CDC’s mpox incident manager, said the 16 915 confirmed cases for the first five months of this year are almost as many as the total for the entire 2024.
Mpox vaccinations are being carried out in seven countries, and Ngongo said the 1.5m LC16 vaccines from Japan were due to finally arrive over the weekend.
Nineteen African countries have active cases, with 2 836 new suspected cases reported this past week.
SA infections
The National Institute of Communicable Disease said no cases of the Clade Ib variant were reported in South Africa in 2024, but between February and March this year, seven laboratory-confirmed cases were recorded in Gauteng – all associated with the Clade Ib variant.
The first case had a recent travel history to Uganda, where there is an ongoing outbreak, and was associated with more cases involving close contacts of the index case.
A fourth case, from the same area, was detected but not linked to the first cluster of three cases. Another three cases were linked to the former case.
These cases present the first detected occurrence of the Clade Ib variant, which is spreading through Africa, in this country.
Diseases unleashed
Meanwhile, 20 countries have cholera outbreaks affecting some 127 409 people, and addressing this was on the agenda of the African Heads of State meeting earlier this week
Seventeen member states have measles outbreaks, seven have dengue and four have Lassa fever.
See more from MedicalBrief archives:
Africa CDC to review mpox emergency status
First clade 1b mpox case detected in America from Africa