The World Health Organization announced that it will distribute 900,000 doses of the mpox (monkeypox) vaccine in nine African countries affected by the current outbreak.
The World Health Organization (WHO) announced this Saturday that it will distribute 900,000 doses of the mpox (monkeypox) vaccine in nine African countries affected by the current outbreak, which has recorded 48,000 cases and 1,048 deaths this year.
This action will be carried out in collaboration with partners such as GAVI (Vaccine Alliance, a public-private partnership that promotes the vaccination of around half of the world’s children) or the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef).
This is the first result of the creation, last month, of a vaccine distribution mechanism, whose objective is to bring six million doses to the African continent before the end of the year, according to WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom. Ghebreyesus, at a press conference, quoted by the Spanish news agency Efe.
“Countries are being informed today of the allocations” of these doses, said Tedros Ghebreyesus, who recalled that the first nations to benefit will be detailed later.
The vaccines against this disease called monkeypox were donated by the United States, Canada, the European Union and 12 member states and are, according to Tedros Ghebreyesus, “an important step towards the control of mpox”, whose outbreak in Africa the WHO declared a again, last year. August, an international emergency problem.
The Ethiopian expert stressed that vaccination is only one of the many weapons to combat the outbreak, with tests to confirm the presence of the virus in suspected cases being another very important one.
In this sense, he recalled that in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRCongo), one of the most affected countries, only between 40 and 50 percent of suspected cases were tested.
In the Democratic Republic of the Congo and neighboring Rwanda, vaccination campaigns have already begun, in which some 50,000 people have already been inoculated, highlighted the director general of the WHO.
The WHO alarm about mpox is due to the rapid expansion and high mortality in Africa of its new variant (clade Ib), different from the one that caused a violent outbreak in Africa in 2022, as well as hundreds of cases in Europe, America northern. and countries in other regions.
This less lethal variant has already caused the first declaration of an international health emergency between 2022 and 2023.
Source: Observadora
