Scientists studying the new strain of mpox, which has spread beyond the Democratic Republic of Congo, say the virus is changing faster than expected and often in areas where experts don't have the funding or equipment to track it effectively .
That means there are many unknowns about the virus itself, the severity of the disease it causes and how it is transmitted, complicating the answer, six scientists in Africa, Europe and the United States told Reuters.
Mpox, formerly known as monkey pox, had been a public health problem in parts of Africa since the 1970s, but had not received international attention until it emerged globally in 2022, prompting the World Health Organization to declare a public health emergency. for global health. Here's the situation 10 months later.
A new strain of the virus, known as clade 1b, is once again attracting global attention after the World Health Organization declared a new health emergency.
The strain is a mutated version of clade 1, a form of mpox that is transmitted by contact with infected animals and was endemic in the Congo for decades. Mpox causes flu-like symptoms and skin rashes, and can be fatal.
Congo has had more than 18.000 suspected clade 1 and clade 1b mpox cases and 615 deaths this year, according to the WHO. There were also 222 confirmed cases of the clade 1b strain last month in four African countries, plus one each in Sweden and Thailand, in people who had traveled to Africa.
"I am concerned that in Africa we are working blindly," said Dr. Dimi Ogoina, an infectious disease specialist at the Niger Delta University Hospital in Nigeria, who chairs the WHO's mpox emergency committee. He was the first to sound the alarm in 2017 about possible sexual transmission of mpox, which has now been proven.
"We don't understand very well the outbreak we're dealing with, and if we don't understand it very well, we're going to have a hard time dealing with the problem in terms of transmission dynamics, disease severity, factors that increase the risk of the disease," Ogoina said. "And I'm concerned that the virus seems to be mutating and producing new strains," he added.
He pointed out that the clade 2b strain in Nigeria took five years or more to evolve enough to spread among humans, causing the 2022 outbreak. The clade 1b strain did the same in less than a year.
Source: KYPE