The World Health Organization has declared monkeypox to be a public health emergency of international concern for the second time in two years after its latest outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and spread to other countries like Sweden and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. This time, the contagion is spreading through the Clade 1b variant of this zoonotic virus which not only has a higher rate of mortality — fatalities in Africa have jumped 160% since last year — but can also be transmitted through close skin-to-skin contact, talking or breathing near an infected person, or using their soiled clothes or bedsheets as opposed to the earlier variants that were only sexually transmitted. It has the potential to become yet another global crisis in public health soon after the Covid-19 pandemic that killed over seven million people. So far, the response to confront the outbreak has been patchy. There is an acute shortage in the supply of the sole mpox vaccine: just about 0.21 million doses may be supplied immediately against the 10 million doses needed to control the disease. Vaccines were deployed in European countries instead of being sent to Africa even though the disease was endemic there, leading to the evolution of the current, more virulent, strain. Greater vaccine equity, including technology transfer to poorer countries, could have helped stop the contagion at the source. Are the errors committed during Covid being replicated?
India has rightly put airports and hospitals on high alert: passengers arriving from the DCR and the Central African countries are being tracked by health officers. While monitoring is key to check the spread of mpox, care must be taken to ensure that the disease does not unleash the virus of racism against visitors from the affected countries — Covid-19 had led to the targeting of not just Southeast Asians but also people from India’s Northeast. Precautionary practices, such as the wearing of masks in public, frequent sanitising of hands, and avoiding crowding, must, once again, become collective good practices. Stepping up vaccine production and the return of vaccine diplomacy — the sharing of medicines among nations — are necessary in equal measure. The rise of zoonotic infections is going to be an embedded feature of the Anthropocene. Governments around the world must, therefore, make greater investments in medicine research and health infrastructure to be prepared for such frequent storms.
