2024-08-17 06:48:53
The World Health Organization urged pharmaceutical companies to ramp up vaccine production and China said it would screen travelers for the disease after the first cases of the deadly strain to be recorded outside Africa were announced in Sweden and Pakistan.
French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal said his country was on “high alert” and would make “new recommendations” for travelers to dangerous areas.
Mpox is caused by a virus that is spread to humans by animals but can also be spread person-to-person through physical contact.
It causes fever, muscle pain and large skin lesions like boils.
The WHO on Wednesday declared the rapid spread of the new Clade 1b strain an international public health emergency – the agency’s highest alert.
This followed the spread of more deadly mpox from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to other African countries.
“We need manufacturers to really scale up so that we have access to many, many more vaccines,” WHO spokeswoman Margaret Harris told reporters.
WHO is asking countries with vaccine stocks to donate them to countries with epidemics.
Harris said mpox is “particularly dangerous for those with weakened immune systems, so people who may have HIV or who are malnourished”, and it is also dangerous for young children.
The United States has said it will donate 50,000 doses of mpox vaccine to the DRC and Attal said France will also send vaccines to countries at risk.
Danish drugmaker Bavarian Nordic said on Thursday it would be ready to make up to 10 million doses of its mpox vaccine by 2025 but that it needed contracts to start production.
The Stockholm-based European Center for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) said the overall risk in Europe was “low”. But he warned that “effective surveillance, laboratory testing, epidemiological investigation and tracing capabilities will be essential to finding cases.”
“Because of the close links between Europe and Africa, we must prepare for more incoming clade I cases,” ECDC director Pamela Rendi-Wagner said in a statement.
Advertising
Hundreds killed in DRC
The virus has swept across the DRC, killing 548 people so far this year, the government said Wednesday.
Nigeria has recorded 39 mpox cases this year, but no deaths, according to its health authorities. Previously unaffected countries such as Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda have reported outbreaks, according to the African Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Sweden’s Public Health Agency announced on Thursday that a case had been registered of Clade 1b.
The patient was infected during a visit to “a part of Africa where there is a large outbreak of mpox Clade 1”, epidemiologist Magnus Gisslen said in a statement.
The extent of mpox in Pakistan’s case was not immediately known, the country’s health ministry said in a statement.
He said the patient, a 34-year-old man, had “come from a Gulf country”.
China announced that it will begin screening people and goods entering the country for mpox in the next six months.
People arriving from countries where epidemics have occurred, who have been in contact with mpox cases or symptoms should “declare to the customs when they enter the country,” the administration Chinese culture says.
Cars, containers and items from areas with mpox cases should be cleaned, he added in a statement.
Advertising
Drive vaccination
Mpox has two subspecies: more vulnerable and deadly Clade 1, located in the Congo region in central Africa; and Clade 2, endemic in West Africa.
An international outbreak that began in 2022 with the Clade 2b subclade caused some 140 deaths out of 90,000 cases, mostly affecting gay and bisexual men.
France reported 107 cases of the milder mpox variant between January 1 and June 30 this year.
The WHO’s European regional office in Copenhagen said the Swedish case was “a clear demonstration of the interconnectedness of our world”.
But he added: “Travel restrictions and border closures are not working and should be avoided.”
#Europe #warns #prepare #mpox #Pakistan #reports #case