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Geneva – The World Health Organization (WHO) has declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) due to the spread of a more dangerous variant of the Mpox virus in Africa. According to the agency, there is a risk that Mpox could spread internationally again after 2022 and become a health risk in several countries.

The WHO followed the recommendation of independent Mpox experts who had met at the WHO’s invitation in the so-called WHO Emergency Committee, as WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in Geneva. “In the coming days and months, the WHO will coordinate the global response measures in close cooperation with all affected countries (…).”

The decision of the members of the emergency committee was unanimous, said committee chairwoman Dimie Ogoina. “We are facing several epidemics with different variants in different countries,” the WHO Director-General explained before the meeting. The transmission routes and the dangers of a disease also differ significantly.

The WHO’s concern relates, among other things, to a virus variant that was discovered in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo at the end of 2023. It is a sublineage of the Mpox clade I, called Ib. It could be more contagious than previous variants and cause more severe disease.

The WHO is also trying to procure more vaccine doses. The European Union (EU) also wants to support this by providing around 215,000 doses of the Mpox vaccine from the manufacturer Bavarian Nordic for the African continent.

The Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) will distribute the vaccines according to regional needs. The authority had already declared the Mpox outbreak a public health emergency of continental significance (PHECS) last Tuesday.

The European Center for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) assessed the risk of the new variant spreading in Europe at the end of July as “very low”. According to the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), there are currently no known cases of Clade I in Germany. © afp/dpa/aks/aerzteblatt.de