Sleepwalking Into a Global Mpox Virus Calamity
A WHO team provides information about how to avoid mpox to residents in eastern Congo in 2022.
Photographer: Eugene Kabambi/World Health Organization
By Jason Gale
August 22, 2024 at 6:00 PM GMT+8
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The latest global health emergency wasn’t sudden or unexpected, but a slow, festering calamity that highlights the perils of inequality and government neglect.
Monkeypox virus, which causes mpox, has been spilling over from rodents and squirrels and infecting humans with increasing frequency in western and central Africa since the 1970s.
Yet, even after touching off a global mpox outbreak two years ago, affecting almost 100,000 people in 116 countries, governments and funding agencies chose largely to ignore the growing zoonotic threat.
WATCH: Pamela Rendi-Wagner, head of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), says a mutated strain of the virus that causes mpox is likely to lead to sporadic imported cases in Europe.Source: Bloomberg TV
Vaccines shown to provide strong protection in 2022 weren’t available in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, neither were tests crucial for diagnosing and isolating patients.
