2024-10-22 11:44:00
A nurse holds a vial of smallpox vaccine at the general hospital in Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo, Saturday, October 5, 2024. MOSES SAWASAWA / AP
A first case of infection with the new variant of the monkeypox virus, the cause of a major epidemic in Africa, has been confirmed in Germany, the Robert-Koch Health Monitoring Institute (RKI) announced on Tuesday, October 22. “On October 18, 2024, an mpox infection with the new clade 1b, acquired abroad, was detected in Germany”reports the RKI, adding that “the risk to the health of the population in Germany” was ” weak “.
The institute, which did not give details about the patient and the circumstances of the infection, said it was observing the situation “very close” and that it would adapt its recommendations if necessary. Transmission of mpox requires “close physical contact”he recalled.
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Mpox, or monkeypox, is a viral disease that spreads from animals to humans but is also transmitted between humans, causing fever, muscle pain and skin lesions. Until then, clade 1 was transmitted mainly by skin contact, notably through clothing and sheets. But the clade 1b strain has acquired a new mode of transmission, sexually, which accelerates its circulation. To summarize, it is a new variant, more deadly and as transmissible as that of 2022, which is now circulating in Africa, with the possibility of transmission to other countries through travel, such as today in Germany.
Adults mainly affected
For several months, a new epidemic has affected Africa, with the highest infection figures found in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Burundi and Nigeria. Two concurrent epidemics are raging. One caused by clade 1 in Central Africa, which mainly affects children, more vulnerable to dehydration and malnutrition that the disease can cause but also to bacterial superinfections of pustules which invade the skin and mucous membranes of patients.
The other, caused by the new variant, clade 1b, affects adults in another region, in the east of the DRC and in neighboring countries.
A total of 42,000 cases have been recorded in Africa since January and some 1,100 people have died from mpox, the African Union health agency said last week, which warned that the epidemic was on course to become “out of control” if no action was taken.
Elsewhere in Europe, cases have been reported in Sweden, and others have also been recorded in several Asian countries. A vaccination campaign was launched at the beginning of October in the DRC, this central African country being, by far, the most affected in the world by the virus.
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