“The committee will advise me on whether the outbreak constitutes a public health emergency of international concern and, if so, on any temporary recommendations to be made,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told X. He had announced on Wednesday that he would convene the emergency committee “as soon as possible.”
The highest possible alert level?
A public health emergency of international concern is the highest alert that WHO can issue. It can be declared by the head of WHO, on the advice of the committee.
Formerly known as monkeypox, MPOX is a viral disease that spreads from animals to humans but is also transmitted through close physical contact with a person infected with the virus. Dubbed “clade 1b,” a new strain of MPOX, detected in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in September 2023 and then reported in several neighboring countries, has raised fears of a spread of this virus. According to the head of the WHO, clade 1b “causes more severe disease than clade 2.”
The DRC is the most affected country with, as of August 3, 14,479 confirmed and suspected cases and 455 deaths, representing a lethality rate of around 3%, according to the African Union health agency.
MPOX was first discovered in humans in 1970 in what is now the DRC (formerly Zaire), with the spread of the clade 1 subtype (of which the new variant is a mutation), mainly limited since then to countries in western and central Africa, with patients generally being contaminated by infected animals. By 2022, a global epidemic, carried by the clade 2 subtype, had spread to around a hundred countries where the disease was not endemic, mainly affecting homosexual and bisexual men.
