Africa CDC says that Mpox is still not under control on the continent

Thursday, the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) said that the mpox spread was still not under control. They also said that the number of cases was still rising in a number of countries.

After the new strain was found, the World Health Organization (WHO) called the current disease outbreak an international public health emergency.

Africa’s countries are having a hard time dealing with yet another major outbreak. This comes after the Covid-19 pandemic, which showed that their health services were not ready to handle a major public health crisis.

According to statistics from the Africa CDC, the number of mpox cases has gone up by 177% and the number of deaths has gone up by 38.5% since the same time last year.

“Today, we can say that mpox is not under control in Africa.” “The rise in cases is still a worry for all of us,” Jean Kaseya, director general of the Africa CDC, said at a weekly meeting about the spread.

Compared to the previous week, 2,912 new cases were reported in one week. One of these cases was in Morocco, which is a new country on the continent. This shows that the disease has spread to all four areas.

Africa CDC said that 15 of the 55 African Union member states have reported cases so far.

“People are still dying in Africa from mpox.” “We lost 14 people in one week,” Kaseya said.

In some places, like Cameroon and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, two types of the disease were spreading. But because testing and surveillance systems were not strong enough, it was hard to know if that was also true in other places.

Kaseya said that Rwanda had begun its vaccination program. Vaccinations will begin in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is where the outbreak is happening, in early October.