Health authorities have ordered doctors to be on the lookout for cases of mpox as a deadly strain has been confirmed to have reached Europe.
The World Health Organization has declared a global health emergency – its highest alert – following an outbreak in Africa.
The first case outside the continent was detected in Sweden, prompting the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control to raise its risk level.
Experts said the new strain is “more severe” and has a “higher mortality rate” than the one that sparked panic in 2022. The UK’s Health Security Agency said no cases have yet been detected and the risk to the population is “low.”
Rapid tests are being made available and GPs and hospitals have been asked to isolate people who show symptoms. The government is said to have enough vaccines and treatments to deal with an outbreak.
Christian Musema, a laboratory nurse, takes a sample from a child declared a suspected case of Mpox at the Munigi treatment centre, Democratic Republic of Congo
The first case outside the continent was detected in Sweden, prompting the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control to raise the risk level. Pictured: Test tubes labelled “monkeypox virus positive and negative”
Swedish State Epidemiologist Magnus Gisslen, Acting Director General of the Public Health Agency Olivia Wigzell and Minister of Social Affairs and Public Health Jakob Forssmed hold a press conference to report on the mpox situation in Stockholm on August 15.
An NHS England spokesman said they were “prepared to respond” if the strain, which has killed 537 people, emerges here.
The deadly variant emerged this month and is crossing borders with a reported 10 percent mortality rate in children, threatening to decimate populations as authorities fail to curb its spread.
Researchers warn that the new ‘Clade 1b’ variant of the disease has already been able to cross the ‘porous’ borders of the DRC, causing the deaths of dozens of people in recent weeks between Burundi, South Africa and the DR Congo, and causing many thousands of displaced people due to conflicts in the region.
Most commonly found in central and eastern Africa, mpox has affected populations since the early 1970s. While a vaccine against the disease now exists, its uptake has been slow in countries that lack the resources and infrastructure for a coordinated program.
Nearly 100,000 people were infected in 2022 during a global outbreak of the disease, caused primarily by the clade IIb virus. The variant was less deadly than the emerging clade Ib variant but killed about 183 people, according to the CDC.
The United States reported as many as 32,063 cases, with 58 deaths during the period, as cases were reported in significant numbers in North, Central and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia and Australasia.
Christian Musema, a laboratory nurse, takes a sample from a child declared a suspected case of Mpox
A child with skin lesions receives treatment at the Munigi treatment centre, Democratic Republic of Congo, on July 19.
Mpox virions shown under a microscope. Experts warn that the new clade 1b is harder to detect
A 1997 image shows MPOX symptoms in a patient in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, formerly Zaire.
The Africa CDC said earlier that monkeypox, formerly known as smallpox, has been detected in 13 countries this year and more than 96% of all cases and deaths have occurred in Congo. Cases are up 160% and deaths up 19% compared to the same period last year.
So far, more than 14,000 cases have been recorded and 524 people have died.
Now, experts tracking recent trends warn that a more lethal variant is showing a propensity to travel across borders, with a mortality rate of five percent in adults and ten percent in children.
While the 2022 strain was largely driven by sexual contact between men, according to The Economist, the Clade Ib variant appears to be transmissible through close non-sexual contact and exacerbated by heterosexual sexual contact, “particularly among female sex workers, who account for around 30 percent of recorded cases.”
Authorities in the Democratic Republic of Congo desperately approved MPOX vaccines to try to contain the outbreak in June, surpassing 1,000 deaths from 20,000 cases in the past year, but many are concerned that affected nations lack the resources to effectively stop the spread.
Zeil Rosenberg MD, executive vice president of Tonix Pharmaceuticals, a company currently developing an mpox vaccine, told MailOnline earlier this month that the disease is now spreading to regions where it has not historically been endemic.
“The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) remains at the centre of an uncontrolled explosion of cases, with 11,000 cases reported this year alone and showing no signs of slowing down,” he warned.
“There are a number of challenges to controlling this outbreak,” Brian Labus, an associate professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, told MailOnline.
“We have seen the spread in camps for displaced people, where high population density increases the risk of the spread of infectious diseases.”
He warned that the virus has mutated and now spreads more easily between people.
‘While we can prevent the disease with vaccines, there are currently none available in the affected areas.
“When these problems are added to the routine challenges of controlling the disease in remote and low-resource settings, it has been very difficult to control the outbreak.”
Michael Marks, a professor of medicine at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said declaring mpox outbreaks in Africa an emergency was justified if it could lead to greater support for containing them.
“It is a failure of the global community that things have had to get to the point where the necessary resources cannot be released,” he said.
Africa CDC officials said nearly 70% of cases in Congo were in children under 15, who also accounted for 85% of deaths.
Jacques Alonda, an epidemiologist working in Congo with international charities, said he and other experts were particularly concerned about the spread of mpox in refugee camps in the conflict-ravaged east of the country.
“The worst case I’ve seen is a six-week-old baby who was only two weeks old when he contracted MPOX,” Alonda said, adding that the baby has been in her care for a month.
‘He became infected because overcrowding at the hospital forced him and his mother to share a room with another person who had the virus, but had not been diagnosed.’