The Democratic Republic of Congo expects to receive its first delivery of mpox vaccine doses on Thursday (5) and a second delivery on Saturday (7), the head of the country’s mpox outbreak response said on Wednesday (4).
Congo is the epicentre of a measles outbreak that the World Health Organisation declared a global public health emergency last month, but efforts to contain the spread of the disease have been hampered by a lack of vaccines.
“We will receive the first batch on September 5 and the second on September 7,” response chief Cris Kacita told Reuters in a WhatsApp message, without giving further details on the number of doses or the supplier.
The arrival of the vaccine doses would help address a huge inequality that has left African countries without access to the two shots used in a global outbreak of measles in 2022, even though they were widely available in Europe and the United States. Washington and Brussels have promised tens of thousands of doses of a vaccine made by Bavarian Nordic and said they could be delivered soon.
Kacita said on Monday that Congo hopes to start the first wave of vaccinations on October 8, but that this will depend on receiving vaccines this week.
Health authorities face a huge challenge as they launch the vital campaign in a tropical country the size of Western Europe. The doses must be kept at -90 degrees Celsius and communities may be wary of taking part.
“The vaccine will not be distributed as soon as it is received,” Kacita said, explaining why it would take about a month from delivery to the launch of the campaign.
“We need to communicate so that the population accepts vaccination,” he said, adding that the six targeted provinces have the capacity to store the doses at the required temperature.
The World Health Organization’s acting director of epidemic and pandemic prevention, Maria Van Kerkhove, said this was the agency’s main focus as it supported Congo’s response.
“We have to look at communication about who will take them [as vacinas] first,” she said, warning that misinformation around vaccines was “quite rampant.”
The number of doses is still limited, she said, so vaccinations will initially be focused on contacts of known cases.
Children are at high risk of contracting mpox, but Bavarian Nordic’s vaccine is not licensed for children. However, van Kerkhove said the WHO recommends its use in outbreaks in children when the benefits outweigh the risks, and this is currently under discussion in Congo.
Flu symptoms
Mpox typically causes flu-like symptoms and pus-filled lesions and can be fatal. There have been 19,710 suspected cases of mpox reported since the start of the year in Congo as of Aug. 31, according to the health ministry. Of those, 5,041 have been confirmed and 655 have been fatal. The disease spreads through close contact, including sexual contact.
“The greatest loss of human life is in rural areas. These are remote areas where there is no support,” said a doctor working on the Congo response who asked not to be identified because the doctor was not authorized to speak to the press.
The doctor expressed concern that a successful campaign depended on vaccinating people in proximity to confirmed positive cases, but many areas with suspected cases did not have adequate resources.
“We cannot have laboratories in places without water and electricity. This is the weakness of current surveillance, the lack of capacity to verify suspected cases in the laboratory,” said the doctor.
WHO’s Van Kerkhove said some areas in Congo had run out of testing and called for more resources to support the response there, as well as in neighboring Burundi, which has also seen a rise in cases of the new strain of mpox in recent weeks. She said vaccines were only part of the response and that measures such as contact tracing and raising awareness about how to prevent infection were also key.
In a video message on Wednesday focused on children returning to school, Congo’s health minister Roger Kamba said washing hands and disinfecting furniture was also important to stop the spread of MPox.
This content was originally published in Congo to receive first doses of mpox vaccine on Thursday on CNN Brasil website.
Source: CNN Brasil
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