Africa has almost 4,000 new mpox cases in a week, but the wait for vaccines continues
ABUJA, Nigeria — Africa is seeing a rapid increase in mpox cases with nearly 4,000 reported in the past week, the continent’s public health body said Tuesday as it repeated a plea for long-awaited vaccines whose arrival this week in the most affected country, Congo, has been delayed. At the earliest, the first batch of vaccine doses promised to support the new outbreaks in Congo will arrive on Sept. 1 after delays caused by documentation and emergency authorization issues, Kaseya said. The batch would include 50,000 doses promised by the U.S. government and 15,000 from vaccines alliance GAVI, said Dr. Ngashi Ngongo, the Africa CDC incidents manager on mpox. Congo has also requested at least 2 million doses from Japan of vaccines that are particularly effective in protecting children, he said, with negotiations “quite advanced.” The new mpox variant first detected in Congo and blamed for the ongoing outbreaks is already triggering “significant” community-level transmission elsewhere, Ngongo said.
Opinion: Will we let mpox spread, repeating devastating public health failures?
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