(Nairobi) – The African Union health agency, the Continental Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), will next week “most likely” declare a “public health emergency” in the face of a smallpox epidemic sweeping across several African countries, its director announced Thursday.
A new strain of smallpox, also called monkeypox, was discovered in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in September 2023 and has since been reported in several neighboring countries, raising concerns that the virus could spread.
The declaration of a “public health emergency,” which will “likely” come next week, is the first of its kind for the Africa CDC “since we were given this mandate in 2023,” the center's director, Jean Cassia, told reporters.
The decision of the continental agency, which will in particular enable the release of funds and a continental response, comes a day after the World Health Organization announced a meeting “as soon as possible” of the Emergency Committee in order to assess whether it is necessary to issue a decision at the highest level of alert in the face of the epidemic.
“Given the spread of smallpox outside the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the potential for its international spread within and outside Africa, I have decided to establish an Emergency Committee […] “We will advise you on whether the outbreak constitutes a public health emergency of international concern,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Wednesday.
This qualification is the highest alert that WHO can raise, and it is the WHO Director-General who can issue it on the advice of the Committee.
Smallpox was first discovered in humans in 1970 in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire), with the spread of subtype 1 (of which the new variant is a mutation), which has since been mainly confined to countries in West and Central Africa, and patients generally come into contact with infected animals.
