UK docs are placed on alert over unfold of lethal mpox virus

Health officials have ordered doctors to look out for cases of mpox as a deadly strain was confirmed to have reached Europe.

The World Health Organisation declared a global health emergency – its highest alert – after an outbreak in Africa.

The first case outside the continent was detected in Sweden, prompting the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control to raise its risk level.

Experts said the new strain is ‘more severe’ with ‘higher mortality’ than the one that sparked panic in 2022. The UK Health Security Agency said no cases have yet been detected and the risk to the population is ‘low’.

Rapid testing is being made available and GPs and hospitals have been told to isolate those with symptoms. The Government is said to have enough vaccines and treatments to deal with an outbreak.

An NHS England spokesman said it is ‘prepared to respond’ if the strain, which has killed 537 people, emerges here.

The deadly variant emerged this month and is crossing borders with a reported mortality rate of 10 per cent in children, threatening to decimate populations with authorities powerless to curtail the spread.

Researchers warn that the new ‘Clade 1b’ variant of the disease has already been able to cross through the DRC’s ‘porous’ borders, causing dozens of people to die in recent weeks between Burundi, South Africa and DR Congo, with many thousands displaced by conflicts in the region.

Typically found in central and east Africa, mpox has blighted populations since the early 1970s. While a vaccine now exists for the disease, uptake has been slow in nations lacking the resources and infrastructure for a coordinated programme. 

Nearly 100,000 people were infected in 2022 during a global outbreak of the disease, caused mostly by the Clade IIb virus. The variant was less deadly than the emerging Clade Ib variant, but killed some 183 people, according to the CDC.

The United States reported as many as 32,063 cases, with 58 deaths during the period as cases were reported in significant numbers in North, Central and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia and Australasia.

The Africa CDC previously said that mpox, formerly known as monkeypox, has been detected in 13 countries this year, and that more than 96% of all cases and deaths are in Congo. Cases are up 160% and deaths are up 19% compared with the same period last year.

So far, there have been more than 14,000 cases and 524 people have died.

Now, experts following recent trends warn a more deadly variant is showing both a propensity to travel across borders with a five per cent mortality rate in adults and ten per cent in children.

While the 2022 strain was largely driven by male-to-male sexual contact, according to The Economist, the Clade Ib variant appears to be transmissible through close non-sexual contact, and exacerbated by heterosexual sexual contact, ‘particularly among sex workers, who account for about 30 per cent of recorded cases’.

Authorities in the DR Congo desperately approved mpox vaccines to try to contain the outbreak in June, passing 1,000 deaths from 20,000 cases within the past year, but many worry the affected nations lack the resources to effectively stop the spread in its tracks.

Zeil Rosenberg MD, executive Vice President of Tonix Pharmaceuticals, a company currently developing an mpox vaccine, told MailOnline earlier this month that the disease is now spreading to regions where historically it has not been endemic.

‘The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) remains the centre of an unchecked explosion of cases with 11,000 cases reported this year alone and showing no signs of slowing,’ he warned.

‘There are a number of challenges in controlling this outbreak,’ Brian Labus, Assistant Professor at the University of Nevada Las Vegas’ Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, told MailOnline.

‘We have seen spread in camps for displaced persons, where high population density increases the risk of infectious disease spread.’

He warned that the virus has mutated and now spreads more easily between people.

‘While we can prevent the disease with vaccines, none are currently available in the affected areas.

‘When you add these problems to the routine challenges of controlling disease in remote, low-resource environments, it has been very difficult to get the outbreak under control.’

Michael Marks, a professor of medicine at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said declaring the mpox outbreaks in Africa an emergency is warranted if that might lead to more support to contain them.

‘It’s a failure of the global community that things had to get this bad to release the resources needed,’ he said.

Officials at the Africa CDC said nearly 70% of cases in Congo are in children younger than 15, who also accounted for 85% of deaths.

Jacques Alonda, an epidemiologist working in Congo with international charities, said he and other experts were particularly worried about the spread of mpox in camps for refugees in the country’s conflict-ridden east.

‘The worst case I’ve seen is that of a six-week-old baby who was just two weeks old when he contracted mpox,’ Alonda said, adding the baby has been in their care for a month.

‘He got infected because hospital overcrowding meant he and his mother were forced to share a room with someone else who had the virus, which was undiagnosed.’