The committee will decide whether to declare a public health emergency of international concern, the highest alert level by the World Health Organization (WHO).
The WHO will convene its emergency committee on mpox, formerly known as monkeypox, on August 14 to assess whether to declare the highest alert level in response to the ongoing outbreak in several African countries. The meeting was announced on Saturday.
“The first emergency committee meeting convened by the WHO Director-General (…) regarding the resurgence of mpox in 2024 has been scheduled for Wednesday, August 14 (…) starting at 12 PM,” the World Health Organization (WHO) announced in a note sent to journalists. This online meeting will be held as usual behind closed doors.
A public health emergency of international concern is the highest alert that the WHO can trigger. It is the WHO Chief who can initiate it, based on the committee’s advice. Mpox is a viral disease that spreads from animals to humans but also transmits through close physical contact with an infected person.
Named “clade 1b,” a new strain of mpox detected in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in September 2023 and subsequently reported in several neighboring countries, raises concerns about the spread of this virus. According to the WHO Chief, clade 1b “causes more severe illness than clade 2.”
The DRC is the most affected country with, as of August 3, 14,479 confirmed and suspected cases and 455 deaths, yielding a fatality rate of about 3%, according to the African Union’s health agency. Mpox was first discovered in humans in 1970 in present-day DRC (formerly Zaire), with the spread of the clade 1 subtype (of which the new variant is a mutation), primarily limited since to countries in West and Central Africa, where patients are typically exposed to infected animals.