The World Health Organization may have declared mpox a global health emergency last week, but the world has reacted far too slowly to the threat. The new variant of mpox has been circulating within the Congo for months. The vast central African nation has seen 96 per cent of the world’s roughly 17,000 recorded cases of mpox this year.
It has also recorded 500 deaths. Making things worse is the fact that the country, till today, does not have a single vaccine. Let’s take a closer look how the world has been slow in reacting to mpox: Origins According to Bloomberg, the current mpox crisis has its origins in the previous emergency.
In 2022, there were mpox outbreaks in more than 70 countries around the world, including the United States, which led the WHO to also declare an emergency. As per Wired, there were 92,783 confirmed cases of mpox across 116 countries, leading to 171 deaths. The 2022 global outbreak predominantly affected gay and bisexual men.
“Ninety-five percent of the cases during the 2022 outbreak were among men who have sex with men, reporting exposure through sexual or close contact with another infected person,” Boghuma Titanji, an associate professor in infectious diseases at Emory University, told Wired. “It was an outbreak that was very focused, which allowed vaccinations to be prioritised among that network.” There are two types of mpox – clade 1 and clade 2.
The 2022 outbreak was the latter. “The 2022 global outbreak was clade 2, and mortalit.