(Bloomberg) -- Mpox vaccines that young children can use will arrive from Japan next week, a crucial step in reducing the spread of the disease that has killed about 1,200 people in the Democratic Republic of Congo this year.
Children in the central African country are bearing the brunt of both mpox as well as an outbreak of a mystery flu-like illness dubbed “Disease X” in a remote southwestern province.
Getting the Japanese vaccine means babies through to the age of five can finally also get inoculated, helping “control the outbreak not only for adults, but also the children,” Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention Director-General Jean Kaseya said in a briefing Thursday.
Roughly the size of Western Europe, Congo is one of the world’s least-developed countries and has a rudimentary health system, with little diagnostic capacity to serve its population of more than 100 million people. Difficulties in getting mpox vaccines have only made matters worse.
More than 65,700 cases of the disease have been reported this year, with 3,545 in the previous seven days and the vast majority in Congo. This is one of the highest weekly jumps this year and shows mpox “is still moving,” Kaseya said. In some parts of Congo, authorities are moving from twice-weekly vaccination to offering mpox shots daily.
Japan, which agreed to provide Congo with 3 million doses along with specialized inoculation needles, is sending a delegation this weekend. That’s so its members can help train local health-care workers in how to effectively scratch under layers of children’s skin to induce an immune response.
Medical professionals used the LC16 vaccine to immunize more than 50,000 children against smallpox in the 1970s, but its administration method hasn’t been widely used in inoculation rollouts for decades.
Mpox strains are still mutating, further raising the risk of spread both in Africa and globally. Kaseya said in November that analysis shows that clade Ia, which has circulated for decades in central and west Africa and is transmitted mainly through contact with animals, may have changed to enable it to spread more easily between people.
Meanwhile, another 147 cases of the unidentified illness were reported in the past week, bringing the total to more than 500 since late October.
Challenges in getting good-quality samples to a national laboratory in the capital, Kinshasa, for testing have delayed efforts to work out the underlying cause of this outbreak.
©2024 Bloomberg L.P.