A public health emergency of international concern is the highest alert that WHO can declare, at the initiative of the Director-General and on the recommendation of the Committee.
In a note sent to journalists on Saturday, the WHO said it had convened the first emergency meeting regarding the resurgence of Mpox 2024 at the request of its director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
Mr. Ghebreyesus announced on X that temporary recommendations will be issued by the committee if it deems the outbreak to be “a public health emergency of international concern.” Formerly known as monkeypox, Mpox is caused by a viral agent 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, raises 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 14,479 confirmed and suspected cases and 455 deaths as of August 3, 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.
In 2022, a global epidemic, carried by the clade 2 subtype, affected around a hundred countries across the world, detected mainly in homosexual and bisexual men.
Faced with this wave of global contaminations which caused the death of 140 people out of around 90,000 cases, the UN agency declared maximum alert in July 2022 before lifting it in May 2023.
