2024-08-16 18:52:24
MPOX Treatment Center at Gongo Hospital in Gomanila, Democratic Republic of the Congo, August 16, 2024.
Two years after an epidemic that killed 140 people and caused some 90,000 cases in more than 75 countries, what is the risk of spreading again around the world? Experts started asking the question, and the World Health Organization (WHO) declared on Wednesday, August 14, that the ongoing MPOX outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and more than a dozen other African countries constituted a public health problem. (Usppi), the highest alert level from the United Nations organization.
The two-year outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo has grown explosively since the beginning of the year, and a new offshoot, a new strain of the virus, began spreading in September 2023, exacerbating these concerns. Neighboring countries that have never encountered the virus on their territory.
On Thursday, the first case of the new, more virulent clade 1b was detected outside Africa: a person living in the Stockholm region of Sweden was diagnosed after returning from Africa. “More imported clade 1 cases are likely to be recorded in the European region in the coming days and weeks”The European branch of the World Health Organization commented Thursday.
The European Center for Disease Prevention and Control raised the risk level on Friday and called on European countries to “Be prepared for more imported type 1 cases”especially “Because of the close ties between Europe and Africa”.
The first victims were children
But alarms are sounding outside Europe as well. On Friday, Pakistan announced its first case of MPO in a traveler returning from a Gulf country. The clades involved are unknown.
So, are we ready to relive the pandemic in 2022? For Xavier Lescure, an infectious disease specialist at the Bichat-Claude-Bernard Hospital in Paris, “2022 is the first attempt at a zoonotic disease [une maladie passée de l’animal à l’humain] Related to human-caused environmental disturbance ». According to him, “We will have a harder time limiting the spread of the virus than we did in 2022 because it spreads from a larger area and is not restricted to specific groups, with all groups having more virulent offshoots.”.
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Let’s go back two years. Outbreaks outside Africa are carried by clade 2b, a variant of the clade prevalent in West Africa that is known to be less lethal than clade 1, which dominates the Congo Basin in central Africa. Therefore, despite strong transmission in Europe and the American continent, the case fatality rate remains below 1%. The disease was spread by an infected person returning from Nigeria and is mainly spread among men who have sex with men (MSM), a group that has become well aware of sexual health issues since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. (MSM).
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