On the Sidelines

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Last month, Samuel Nduwimana was in agony in a hospital in Bujumbura, the financial capital of the small central African nation of Burundi.

“I felt very sick and scared. I couldn’t even walk anymore,” he told Agence France-Presse. “I started to lose my appetite, I had a fever and I felt a small pimple on my genitals that hurt a lot. I didn’t even know what I was suffering from.”

Unfortunately, Nduwimana was stricken with monkeypox, or mpox, the latest horrific contagious disease to emerge from Africa.

A virus that causes painful rashes, mpox has no cure, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It has two types – Clade I and II. Clade I, the more severe version, which is driving the current outbreak in Burundi and beyond, kills as many as one in 10 of its victims.

At the time of his interview, Nduwimana was one of around 170 cases in Burundi. Last week, United Nations officials reported 564 confirmed mpox cases and almost 1,600 suspected cases, one-third of which were infecting children.

The spread is occurring in part because Burundi is not prepared to stop mpox. Landlocked Burundi is the world’s poorest country, Bloomberg reported. More than half the country’s children, who are disproportionately contracting mpox, live in poverty.

Burundi’s proximity to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the epicenter of the disease, where most of the 37,500 infections and 1,451 deaths so far tallied have occurred, is also not helping. To make matters worse, testing in the DRC is inadequate, so local and international health officials can’t obtain an accurate reading of the depth of the problem, wrote Voice of America.

Congolese authorities intend to begin vaccinating folks on Oct. 2, meaning more people will likely contract mpox and die before the population’s resistance gains enough traction to counter the spread, CBS News added.

The tragedy is that, even with the jabs, the Congolese will be fighting an uphill battle – even though, due to their experience with health threats, they have the expertise necessary to fight mpox, said Maria Van Kerkhove, interim director of the Health Emergencies Program at the World Health Organization.

They also need other medical equipment, support, and infrastructure – diagnostics, therapeutics, and other health products – to stamp out mpox, she said.

Africans aren’t the only ones in danger. Sweden was the first country outside Africa to report a case of mpox, wrote Reuters and NBC News. Cases have been documented in Thailand and India, too.

The sliver of good news is that the WHO approved a new vaccine for mpox this month by Denmark’s Bavarian Nordic, Politico reported.

However, it’s late in the game for the DRC and Burundi, wrote CBS News. Despite pledges of hundreds of thousands of doses, Africa needs to vaccinate 10 million people to contain the spread. No one thinks that will happen any time soon.

Part of the problem is financial – African nations cannot pay for what they need. Another part is logistics. But mostly, it’s a question of will, similar to what happened during the coronavirus pandemic, say health officials, noting that Western countries are sitting on hundreds of millions of doses of mpox vaccines.

“It’s not a technical question, it’s a political one,” Maria Van Kerkhove told Reuters. “Vaccines are useless on shelves … Why wouldn’t we get them to the people who need them right now?”