HARARE, Zimbabwe –
Health authorities in Africa say they are treating the widening monkeypox outbreak as an emergency and are urging rich countries to share the world’s limited supply of vaccines in a bid to avoid the glaring equity problems seen during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Monkeypox has sickened people in parts of central and west Africa for decades, but a lack of laboratory diagnostics and poor surveillance means many cases remain undetected across the continent. To date, countries in Africa have reported more than 1,800 suspected cases so far this year, including more than 70 deaths, but only 109 have been laboratory confirmed.
“This particular outbreak means an emergency for us,” said Ahmed Oguel, acting director of the African Centers for Disease Control. “We want to be able to deal with monkeypox as an emergency now so it doesn’t cause any more pain and suffering,” he said.
The WHO said last week that its emergency committee had concluded that the expanding monkeypox outbreak was alarming but did not yet warrant declaring a global health emergency. The UN health agency said it would review its decision if the disease continues to spread across more borders, shows signs of increased severity or begins to infect vulnerable groups such as pregnant women and children.
Worldwide, more than 5,000 cases of monkeypox have been reported in 51 countries, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Most of these cases are in Europe. No deaths have been reported outside of Africa.
Within Africa, the WHO said monkeypox had spread to countries where it had not been seen before, including South Africa, Ghana and Morocco. But more than 90 percent of the continent’s infections are in Congo and Nigeria, according to WHO Africa Director Dr Moeti Matshidiso.
She said that given the limited global supply of monkeypox vaccines, the WHO was in talks with manufacturers and countries with stocks to see if they could be shared. The vaccines were developed mainly to stop smallpox, a related disease — and most are not approved for use against monkeypox in Africa. Vaccines have not been used so far to try to eradicate monkeypox epidemics in Africa; officials have relied mostly on measures such as contact tracing and isolation.
“We would like to see the global focus on monkeypox act as a catalyst to defeat this disease once and for all in Africa,” she said at a press briefing on Thursday.
The WHO noted that, similar to last year’s race for vaccines against COVID-19, countries with supplies of vaccines to stop monkeypox are not yet sharing them with African countries.
“We don’t have any donations that have been offered to (poorer) countries,” said Fiona Bracca, who heads the WHO’s emergency response team in Africa. “We know that those countries that have reserves, they keep them mainly for their own population.”
The WHO said last month it was working to set up a mechanism to share vaccines with countries with the biggest outbreaks, which some fear could see vaccines go to wealthy countries such as Britain, Germany and France, some of the biggest donors of the agency and who already have their own consumables.
While cases of monkeypox in Europe and North America have been identified primarily in men who are gay, bisexual, or cohabiting with other men, this is not the case in Africa.
The WHO’s Tible Traore said detailed data from Ghana showed that the number of monkeypox cases was almost equally split between men and women.
“We haven’t seen a spread among men who have sex with men yet,” he said.
Among the cases of monkeypox in Britain, which has the largest outbreak outside of Africa, the vast majority of cases are in men, and officials note that it spreads only within “defined sexual networks of gay, bisexual or men who have sex with men’.
Scientists warn that anyone is at risk of contracting monkeypox if they come into close physical contact with an infected patient or their clothing or sheets.
In Africa, monkeypox has mainly spread to humans from infected wild animals such as rodents or primates. It usually does not cause widespread outbreaks or rapid spread between people.
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AP reporter Maria Cheng in London contributed.
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