DRC: Mpox Spreads Amid the Arrival of the First Vaccines
Quaranteen Zone of Mpox in DRC, Aug 2024 Photo: @MSF_Mexico
August 20, 2024 Hour: 5:18 pm
“We have not yet started to vaccinate, we will in a few days,”
The mpox virus continues to spread in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where more than 1,000 new cases and 24 deaths have been registered in the past week, while the country and the African Union (AU) are waiting for the arrival of the first vaccines in the coming days.
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“We have not yet started to vaccinate, we will in a few days,” said the director general of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Africa (CDC), Jean Kaseya, at a weekly press conference to assess the impact of the new mpox outbreak originating in DRC.
The AU-dependent public health agency is “working with all countries and finalizing continental plans with UNICEF (United Nations Children’s Fund) and the World Health Organization (WHO)” to ensure that no “not a dose of this expensive vaccine,” Kaseya said.
The director of CDC Africa said that the agency has a “clear plan” to acquire and make available to Africans ten million doses of the mpox vaccine by the end of 2025.
At a press conference from Kinshasa on Monday, the Congolese Minister of Public Health, Hygiene and Social Welfare, Roger Kamba, announced that his country expects to receive by the end of this week a first batch of the more than three million vaccines which, for the moment, are going to be donated by Japan, Belgium and the USA.
The drugs will join the response plan announced by Kamba, which includes a cost of US$49 million (about €44 million) to raise awareness, deploy teams and treat patients.
Autor: OSG
Fuente: Aljazeera-DW
