Officials have issued an urgent warning that a dangerous new strain of monkeypox “shows no sign of slowing” and could soon spread to new countries.
The Democratic Republic of Congo has become a hotspot for the strain, known as clade 1b, with at least 25 reported cases popping up in one of its major cities.
Simultaneously, the country is also struggling to control strain clade 1, which kills up to 10 percent of those infected, the majority of whom have been children.
Of clade 1b, Dr Placide Mbala-Kingebeni, head of epidemiology and global health at the University of Kinshasa, warned that the risk of cross-border infection is increasing.
More than a dozen cases in the city of Goma have been detected in displacement camps full of people who fled nearby conflict, which Dr Mbala-Kingebeni said was concerning.
He told The Telegraph: “There is a risk that the outbreak could go outside the country, and that risk is increasing. You know how people live in these camps, with poor sanitary conditions, these factors can lead to a large outbreak in this area.
“As Goma is connected to other countries – not just Burundi, Rwanda, Kenya and Tanzania, but there are also flights to Europe – there’s also a potential risk of an outbreak outside the continent.”
Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, head of the World Health Organisation, said at a press conference earlier in the week that monkeypox is still “a global health threat” and warned that the DRC outbreak “shows no sign of slowing”.
He added: “There is a risk of cross border, of the virus continuing to move because borders are very porous with neighbouring countries.”
In May, officials warned that strain clade 1b had “pandemic potential” in the DRC town of Kamituga, and since then it has only continued to spread.
Now, an analysis by Dr Mbala-Kingebeni revealed that monkeypox cases in the South Kivu province of the DRC have shot up from 10 per week to more than 160.
He concluded: “While we are orienting to understand clade 1b, we should not be distracted from the worse situation in endemic regions, where we see a growing number of cases of clade 1 with high mortality.
“At the moment, clade 1b seems more transmissible and easier to go through sexual contact, but clade 1 remains more dangerous and associated with higher mortality.”