According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the spread of the Mpox virus in Africa is not comparable to the corona pandemic. “Mpox is not the new corona,” said WHO Europe Director Hans Kluge on Tuesday. This applies both to the Mpox variant 1, which is responsible for the current epidemic in Central and East Africa, and to the Mpox variant 2, which triggered the cross-continental epidemic of 2022.
Unlike the novel coronavirus Sars-CoV-2 at the end of 2019, the world knows how to combat Mpox, Kluge emphasized. However, not as much is known about how Mpox variant 1 works as variant 2, so more information needs to be collected.
The Mpox virus was first detected in laboratory monkeys in Denmark in 1958; the disease was known for decades as monkeypox. The long-known virus strain 1a was transmitted from animals to humans in particular.
However, the now rampant sub-variant 1b has not been known to be transmitted from animals to humans, explained the head of the WHO emergency program, Catherine Smallwood. 1b is therefore apparently transmitted “exclusively” from person to person – and apparently more easily than other Mpox variants. The virus strain 1b is currently circulating in the Democratic Republic of Congo and some other African countries such as Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda.
The WHO declared the highest alert level last week due to the spread of the new Mpox subgroup 1b there. This subvariant of the Mpox virus appears to be transmitted primarily through sexual contact, while the Mpox variant 1 is also passed on through other contacts.
Kluge admitted that the transmission routes of Mpox are “not yet very clear”. However, the risk of disease for the population in general is “weak”. The answer to the question of whether lockdown measures like those during the corona pandemic are necessary is “clearly no”.
The WHO also does not recommend wearing masks or mass vaccinations. It only advises the most vulnerable population groups to be vaccinated against Mpox in the event of an epidemic. According to the WHO, two vaccines have been available for several years: MVA-BN from the Danish-German pharmaceutical company Bavarian Nordic and the LC16 vaccine developed on behalf of the Japanese government.
