A Covid-19 Encore With Monkeypox

A familiar pattern is emerging in the battle against monkeypox with the US and Europe grabbing scarce vaccine supplies

IN THE midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have another disease, monkeypox, which the World Health Organization (WHO) has declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC). That was towards the end of July.

The panic was triggered in early May, when the US and countries in Europe, where the disease is not endemic, started reporting outbreaks of monkeypox along with several endemic countries in West and Central Africa.

This is why the disease became a matter of global concern. Otherwise, would cases in the Democratic Republic of the Congo or say, in Nigeria, have occasioned such alarm? But with monkeypox cases and clusters erupting in both non-endemic and endemic countries, the disease is belatedly coming into WHO's focus, after its advisory committee decide twice earlier against labelling monkeypox a PHEIC.

Monkeypox is a viral infection that has been endemic in about a dozen countries in Africa for several years now. There has been an epidemic in Nigeria since 2017, with more than 200 confirmed and over 500 suspected cases, according to media reports. In 2018, Nigerian scientists had warned that the virus had changed its behaviour and was spreading not from animals but from humans to humans. No one took serious note of this and, for lack of funds for research, there was no follow-up on the findings of the scientists. The crux of the problem, in the view of some public health experts, has been the lack of engagement by WHO in ensuring vaccinations in the endemic regions of Africa, even though scientists and public health officials have been warning for years now that the virus could spread more widely and rapidly. Reports say that over 31 million doses of the smallpox vaccine, which also provides protection against monkeypox, had earlier been pledged to Africa.