Blitz Bureau
AHEAD of an emergency meeting to be held on August 14, 2024 to discuss the spread of mpox (earlier called monkeypox) within and outside the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the World Health Organization (WHO) has called for vaccine candidates for fast approval and distribution.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhenom Ghebreyesus invited pharmaceutical companies to submit dossiers for emergency use listing (EUL). The strategy is used in times of public health emergencies like pandemics to make the authorisation of new and critical medicines and vaccines simpler. It also facilitates distribution of such resources through global initiatives.
“WHO is requesting manufacturers to submit data to ensure that the vaccines are safe, effective, of assured quality and suitable for the target populations,” the United Nations health agency wrote in a press release August 9, 2024. The meeting with the Emergency Committee held under the International Health Regulations will take a call on whether the latest mpox outbreak is a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC) – WHO’s most serious alarm.
Nearly 27,000 cases have been reported in the DRC and 1,100 people — many of them children — have succumbed to the infection since the infection began in 2022-23. Since last September, the contagion has spread to nine neighbouring countries, including Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda, where the disease was reported for the first time.
The new clade of the virus — Ib — that emerged in the DRC late last year has been observed to be much deadlier than the other variants. Moreover, the disease has now been affecting children disproportionately, as reported by the newspaper The Hindu. “While the initial spread was seemingly through sexual contact, the epidemiology of the disease rapidly shifted to affect children under 15 years who constitute over 60 per cent of all cases and 80 per cent of all deaths, with the largest case fatality rate in children aged less than one year,” it noted.
Caseload increase
The mpox caseload has increased 160 per cent in 2024, according to the African Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. The fatalities have gone up by 19 per cent, it added. In 2022, the disease was declared a global emergency after it spread to some 70 countries.
