The head of the World Health Organization believes the ongoing mpox outbreaks in Africa might be stopped in the next six months, and said Friday that the agency's first shipment of vaccines should arrive in Congo within days.
To date, Africa has received just a tiny fraction of the vaccines needed to slow the spread of the virus, especially in Congo, which has the most cases - more than 18,000 suspected cases and 629 deaths.
"With the governments' leadership and close cooperation between partners, we believe we can stop these outbreaks in the next six months," WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a press briefing.
He said that while mpox infections have been rising quickly in the last few weeks, there have been relatively few deaths. Tedros also noted there were 258 cases of the newest version of mpox, with patients identified in Burundi, Rwanda, Kenya, Uganda, Sweden and Thailand.
Earlier this month, WHO declared the ongoing mpox outbreaks in Africa a global emergency, hoping to spur a robust global response to the disease on a continent where cases were spreading largely unnoticed for years, including in Nigeria. In May, scientists detected a new version of the disease in Congo that they think could be spreading more easily.
