Failure to deal with mpox outbreak ‘is risk not just to Africa but whole world’

A failure to show solidarity with African countries at the heart of the mpox outbreak will put the world at risk and harm preparations for future pandemics, health leaders have said.

The World Health Organization on Wednesday declared an international public health emergency in the face of rising cases that are spreading beyond the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where the virus is endemic.

More than 18,700 cases – and over 500 deaths – have been reported so far this year in Africa, already higher than for the whole of 2023. The Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has declared a continental public health emergency.

Dr Ebere Okereke, associate fellow in the global health programme at Chatham House, said: “The consequences of failing to respond robustly to these declarations could be severe, potentially leading to the increased spread of new and more dangerous variants. The risk of a failure to act now is not just a risk to Africa, but to the rest of the world.”

Both declarations, she said, “provide an opportunity to test the global response to health emergencies in the post-Covid-19 era, to show that lessons of equity have been learned”.

The response to the Covid pandemic damaged relations among richer and poorer countries. Resources including vaccines, tests and PPE took much longer to reach developing countries than they did their wealthier counterparts.

Negotiations around a planned pandemic agreement governing how the world should respond to major disease outbreaks failed to meet a deadline for agreement this year at the World Health Assembly in Geneva. The issue of equity has proven a key sticking point – including how developing countries will be guaranteed access to drugs and treatment in return for their efforts capturing information on pathogens circulating in their territories.

Okereke said that how the global community responds to the declarations will be “a litmus test for the potential effectiveness of a future pandemic treaty”.

And an underwhelming response would cast doubt on the effectiveness of the current systems to declare emergencies, she said.

Nick Dearden, director of Global Justice Now, said: “Mpox has been endemic in a handful of African countries for years. Yet despite having the medicines to treat it, no serious action was taken until the outbreak posed a threat to the west.

“We saw this same inequity play out during the Covid pandemic, where lives lost in the global south were shamefully treated as collateral damage in pursuit of more and more pharmaceutical profiteering. It is inevitable, then, that the global south’s trust in the west has plummeted.”

Dearden said pharmaceutical corporations were “continuing to impede equitable access to vaccines in pursuit of higher profit” and called on rich countries, including the UK, to “stand up to big pharma” and back measures in the pandemic treaty negotiations “that would stop this deep inequity playing out time and time again”.

The US said it will donate 50,000 doses of the Jynneos vaccine against mpox to the DRC. But longer term, health leaders at Africa CDC have said a sustainable supply chain, including manufacturing on the continent, will be needed.