The rapid spread of mpox – what used to be called monkeypox – in Africa has been declared a global emergency. A new form of the virus is at the heart of concerns, but there still remain huge unanswered questions. Is it more contagious? We don’t know.
How deadly is it? We don’t have the data. Is this going to be a pandemic? “We have to avoid the trap of thinking this is going to be Covid all over again and we’re going to have lockdowns - or that this will play out like mpox did in 2022,” says Dr Jake Dunning, an mpox scientist and doctor who has treated mpox patients in the UK. To assess the threat – despite the uncertainty - we first need to realise this is not one mpox outbreak, but three.
They are all happening at the same time, but affecting different groups of people and behaving differently. They are labelled by their “clade” – essentially which branch of the mpox virus family tree they come from. The World Health Organization labelled Clade 1b as one of the main reasons for it declaring a Public Health Emergency of International Concern.
This strain has spread to countries previously unaffected by mpox - Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda. It was first reported this year, but genetic analysis has traced its origins back to September 2023 in the gold-mining city of Kamituga, South Kivu Province, DRC. “There is a sex industry in the mining city and it has rapidly spread out to border countries because of the massive movement of people,” Leandre Mu.