IN a crowded emergency mpox isolation ward in eastern Congo, dozens of sick patients lie on thin mattresses on the hard dirt floor.
Hospital staff already stretched thin, are struggling with severe drug shortages to treat the virus and a lack of space to look after the surge in patients.
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Desperate and uncertain, helpless mothers have resorted to popping their babies’ painful blisters and creating makeshift remedies from salt and lemon.
The Democratic Republic of Congo has become the epicenter of a mutant mpox outbreak, which the World Health Organisation (WHO) recently declared a global public health emergency.
The new strain, called clade 1b is thought to be more dangerous than it’s predecessor clade 2 – which spread internationally in 2022.
There were 19,710 suspected cases of the new clade reported since the start of the year in Congo by August 31, according to the health ministry.
Of those, 5,041 were confirmed and 655 were fatal.
In response to the spread of the new bug, vaccines are expected to arrive into the country within days to combat the new mutant strain.
However, at the hospital complex in the town of Kavumu, where 900 unwell patients have been admitted over the past three months, health workers are in urgent need of additional support.
“We run out of medicine every day,” head doctor Musole Mulamba Muva, told Reuters.
“There are many challenges we struggle to overcome with our local means,” he said.
Last week, 135 patients, both children and adults, were crowded into the mpox ward.
Inside, they are seen squeezed between three large plastic tents set up on damp earth without any floor covering.
Relatives of sick patients, who typically provide most of the meals at places like Kavumu Hospital, have been banned from visiting the mpox ward to prevent the risk of contamination.
“We do not have anything to eat,” said Nzigire Lukangira, the 32-year-old mother of a hospitalised toddler.
“When we ask for something to lower our children’s temperature, they do not give us anything,” she told the news site, while pouring honey into her daughter’s mouth.
Mpox causes flu-like symptoms and pus-filled lesions and, while usually mild, it can kill.
It is spread through close contact with infected animals or people.
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Children, pregnant women and people with weakened immune systems are all at higher risk of complications.
Although there is no specific treatment for mpox, there are ways to help people recover and manage symptoms, which include antiviral medicines and painkillers.
DESPERATE MEASURES
Like other mothers in the Kavumu mpox ward, Nzigire had started making traditional remedies to ease her baby’s pain.
They dipped their fingers in potassium bicarbonate or salty lemon juice and popped their children’s blisters.
Adult patients did the same to themselves.
Most cases came from the town itself and surrounding villages. Two other makeshift mpox wards have been set up in the area.
The currently available vaccine is a repurposed version of the smallpox vaccine, as the viruses are closely related.
It can be administered either before exposure to the virus or after contact has occurred.
Should we be worried?
Dr Jonas Albarnaz, a research fellow specialising in pox viruses at The Pirbright Institute, said:
“This news of a case of clade 1 mpox in Sweden is concerning for two main reasons.
“First, this is the first clade 1 mpox virus case outside Africa. This indicates that the extent of the international spread of clade 1 outbreak in DRC might be larger than we knew yesterday.
“And second, clade 1 mpox virus is associated with a more severe disease and higher mortality rates than the clade 2 virus responsible for the international mpox outbreak in 2022.
“This is hard to predict whether we will see further cases of clade 1 mpox outside of Africa, but this case in Sweden is a warning call for public health authorities to be vigilant and implement robust surveillance and contact-tracing strategies to detect possible new cases early on.
“It’s also critical to determine what is the link between this clade 1 mpox virus detected in Sweden and the ongoing outbreak in DCR.”
The jab was credited for helping put an end to the 2022 outbreak.
However, experts are uncertain whether the same vaccine will be effective against the new strain.
It hasn’t been tested against the more potent version of the bug, which has spread across Africa and more recently, Sweden and Thailand.
While no cases have yet been confirmed in the UK, experts suspect the new variant is already in Britain.
Due to how long it takes for symptoms to emerge, they believe we could see cases within the next two weeks.
However, Europe is unlikely to see as many deaths as central Africa due to better access to quality healthcare, they said.
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