Authorities in Ivory Coast have recorded twenty-eight cases of mpox, one of which was fatal, the country's National Institute of Public Hygiene (Institut national de l'hygiene publique, INHP) told AFP yesterday Tuesday.
The INHP recorded as of yesterday, Tuesday, August 20, "28 (laboratory) confirmed cases, including one fatal" in Abidjan, explained Dr. Dauda Coulibaly.
A previous official tally, made public on August 1, spoke of 6 "non-fatal" cases.
"The situation is not a reason to declare alarm," said Dr. Coulibaly, "we are in the initial stage of an epidemic, we do not see any major outbreak".
In any case, "surveillance has been stepped up," he continued: "we must break the chains of transmission — trace the contacts of the cases, isolate them and trace them."
The first cases of mpox detected in Ivory Coast this year corresponded to the strain of the virus that caused the previous global outbreak in 2022, clade 2, but "analyses are ongoing" in a laboratory to ascertain whether this is also the case in the new cases.
As cases of mpox have re-emerged, primarily in Africa, a new, more easily transmitted, potentially deadlier variant, clade 1b, was identified last September in DR Congo.
If the infections from all strains of the virus are calculated, the DR Congo is the country most affected, by far of all the others: it counts around 16.000 cases, among them 548 fatal.
Clade 1b hits were also found in other East African states; one was verified in Europe, in Sweden.
The resurgence of mpox in Africa prompted the World Health Organization (WHO) to declare a public health emergency of international concern on August 14, its highest level of alert, as it did in 2022.
The virus that causes the disease — previously known as monkeypox — was first identified in humans in 1970, in DR Congo. It was infected by subtype clade 1. Its new variant is a mutation.
Source: protothema.gr