One of Africa’s top public health officials has a message for the world’s leaders: Help stop the mpox outbreak in Africa. “Not controlling this outbreak in Africa can lead to a pandemic and deaths because we can see mutation again of the virus,” Dr. Jean Kaseya, the director-general of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, told Carmen. A new variant of the virus, known as clade 1b, which transmits easily and can be more deadly, drove the Africa CDC to declare the mpox outbreak a public health emergency in August, a day before the World Health Organization sounded a global alarm about it. The Democratic Republic of the Congo and its neighboring countries have reported more than 29,000 suspected cases of the rash-causing disease since the beginning of the year and more than 800 deaths. President Joe Biden pledged Tuesday to donate one million vaccine doses and $500 million to fight the outbreak, a significant ramp-up of the U.S. response. Kaseya talked with Carmen about how the U.S. can help curb the outbreak, what he expects from the rest of the world and how stigma about the disease makes responding to it harder. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. What do you make of Biden’s pledge? We thank the U.S. for the support. We are looking forward to discussing with the U.S. authorities the ways we can work together. We need around 10 million doses to stop this outbreak. While 1 million is a major step, we still have a huge gap, and we believe also the U.S. can be a major partner for local manufacturing of this vaccine in Africa. In preparation for the mpox vaccination campaign in the DRC, what are you doing to convince people to get the shot? I told everyone, when the DRC starts the vaccination campaign, I will go get vaccinated myself. We need to stop stigma because, as you know, in 2022, even some journalists were calling mpox a gay issue. In many countries in Africa, being gay can lead to being jailed. When someone knows that I have symptoms, they will not disclose that because the way they will be judged maybe can destroy them more than what the disease is doing. With clade 1b, people started mostly to talk about the transmission among sex workers. Now, the stigma around that was: If you have mpox, either you are gay or you are a sex worker. We even saw husbands kicking out their wives because they got mpox. Now, we are communicating appropriately. I say to people: “Anyone can get it. Anyone.”
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