(Bloomberg) -- The Democratic Republic of Congo may receive Mpox vaccines from the US as soon as next week, Health Minister Roger Kamba said.
The central African nation has asked the US and Japan to send vaccines to help stem an outbreak that has so far infected more than 16,700 people and caused 570 deaths, he said.
“I hope by next week we should have doses,” Kamba said in a broadcast on the ministry’s social media sites on Monday. The US promised 50,000 doses earlier this month as part of a $424 million aid package.
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The World Health Organization declared mpox a public health emergency of international concern on Aug. 14 as cases climbed, a day after the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention declared a continent-wide version for the first time.
There have been regular mpox outbreaks in Congo since the 1970s, where two-thirds of cases were transmitted from animals to humans, Kamba said. Now the country is seeing more human-to-human transmissions, particularly through sexual contact, via a mutated version of the virus that is spreading to other countries, he said.
Many cases in Congo are in children under 15 and about 3.4% of people contracting the disease are dying, often because people don’t get treatment soon enough, Kamba said.
“When the care is good, there are very few deaths,” he said. In Congo’s eastern South Kivu province, the epicenter of the outbreak of the mutated virus, there were no deaths last week, he said.
Congo has experience fighting mpox and other viruses like Ebola, HIV, Covid-19 and tuberculosis, according to Kamba. It needs help getting the 3.5 million doses of vaccines it will require to halt the outbreak and which may cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
Congo is one of the world’s poorest countries and long-term conflicts in its eastern region have displaced more than 7 million people, heightening concerns that the virus may spread in refugee camps.
The government has also written to the international vaccine alliance, Gavi, to request vaccines, Kamba said.
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