As Africa’s mpox epidemic gathers pace, the world has another opportunity to demonstrate collective commitment to tackling an international health crisis. The challenge is to provide effective diagnostics, vaccines and treatments to regions with poor medical infrastructure — and to do so more promptly and efficiently than during the Covid-19 pandemic and previous outbreaks of viral infection.
The signs so far are not encouraging. The World Health Organization first declared mpox, previously known as monkeypox, to be a public health emergency of international concern in 2022. That outbreak, transmitted mainly by sexual contact, ebbed sufficiently for the WHO to let its emergency call lapse last year, before significant steps had been taken to develop tools to tackle the disease.
This year mpox has surged back, driven by a new viral variant called clade 1b, which seems to cause more severe symptoms and to be more transmissible, particularly to children. Almost 4,000 cases and about 80 deaths have been reported in the past week, according to the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, bringing the total recorded in the current outbreak above 22,000 cases and 600 deaths.