Sarah Bagheni had been suffering from headaches, fever and itchy and unusual skin lesions for days, but she had no idea that her symptoms could be caused by mpox and that she was one of the victims of a growing global health crisis.
She also has no idea where to get medical help.
She and her husband live in the Bulengo refugee camp in eastern Congo, a region that is actually the epicenter of a series of MPOX outbreaks in Africa.
The alarming rise in cases this year, including a new strain of the virus identified by scientists in eastern Congo, prompted the World Health Organization to declare it a global health emergency on Wednesday. The organization said the new variant could spread beyond the five African countries where it had already been detected, a timely warning that came a day before Sweden reported its first case of the new variant.
In the vast Central African country of Congo, where more than 96% of the world’s approximately 17,000 recorded cases of mpox have been diagnosed this year and where about 500 people have died from the disease, many of the most vulnerable appear unaware of its existence or the threat it poses.
We don’t know anything about this, Bagheni’s husband, Habumuremyiza Hire, said Thursday over mpox. I watch her condition helplessly because I don’t know what to do. We continue to share the same room.
Millions of people are thought to be unable to get medical care or advice in the conflict-torn east, where dozens of rebel groups have been battling Congolese army troops for years over mineral-rich areas, triggering a massive displacement crisis. Hundreds of thousands of people like Bagheni and her husband have been forced to stay in overcrowded refugee camps around Goma, while more have sought refuge in the city.
Conditions in the camps are terrible and medical facilities are virtually non-existent.
Mahoro Faustin, who heads Bulengo camp, said administrators first noticed about three months ago that people in the camp were experiencing fever, body aches and chills, symptoms that could indicate malaria, measles or mpox.
There is no way to know how many mpox cases there are in Bulengo because of a lack of testing, he said. There have been no recent health campaigns to inform the tens of thousands of people in the camp about mpox, and Faustin said he worries about how many people could be undiagnosed.
Just look at the overcrowding here, he said, pointing to a sea of dilapidated tents. If nothing is done, we’re all going to get infected here, or maybe we’re all already infected.
About 70 percent of new MPOX cases in the Goma region over the past two months, recorded at a Medair-run treatment center, came from refugee camps, said Dr. Pierre Olivier Ngadjole, the international aid agency’s health advisor in Congo. The youngest case was a one-month-old baby and the oldest a 90-year-old, he said.
In severe cases of mpox, people can develop lesions on the face, hands, arms, chest, and genitals. Although the disease originally occurs in animals, in recent years the virus has been spread between people through close physical contact, including sex.
Bagheni’s best hope for a diagnosis for her injuries is a government hospital two hours away. That’s probably out of the question, as she already has difficulty with mobility, having previously had both her legs amputated.
Seven million people are internally displaced in Congo, more than 5.5 million of them in the east of the country, according to the UN refugee agency. Congo has the largest refugee camp population in Africa and one of the largest in the world.
The humanitarian crisis in eastern Congo presents almost every possible complication when it comes to stopping an MPOX outbreak, said Dr. Chris Beyrer, director of Duke University’s Global Health Institute.
That includes war, illegal mining industries that attract sex workers, temporary populations near border regions and persistent poverty. He also said the global community has missed multiple warning signs.
We are paying attention now, but mpox has been spreading in Congo and Nigeria since 2017, Beyrer said, adding that experts have long called for vaccine sharing with Africa, but with little effect. He said the WHO’s declaration of emergency came late, with more than a dozen countries already affected.
Beyrer said that unlike COVID-19 or HIV, there is a good vaccine, treatments and diagnostics for mpox, but access problems are worse than ever in areas like eastern Congo.
In 2022, there were outbreaks in more than 70 countries around the world, including the United States, leading the WHO to also declare a state of emergency that lasted until mid-2023. It was largely stopped in wealthy countries within months through vaccines and treatments, but few doses have been made available in Africa.
The new and potentially more contagious variant of mpox was first discovered this year in a mining town in eastern Congo, about 450 kilometers (280 miles) south of Goma. It is unclear how much of the blame lies with the new variant, but Congo is now battling its worst outbreak yet, and at least 13 African countries have recorded cases, four of them for the first time.
The outbreaks in the four countries Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda are linked to the one in Congo. On Friday Doctors Without Borders reported that the increase in Congo poses a major risk for the spread of the disease to other countries.
Salim Abdool Karim, an infectious disease expert who chairs the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s emergency committee, said the outbreak in Congo is a particularly worrying change because it is disproportionately affecting young people. Children under 15 account for 70% of cases and 85% of all deaths in the country, the Africa CDC reported.
Unlike the global outbreak in 2022, which mainly affected gay and bisexual men, mpox now appears to be spreading among heterosexual populations.
According to the state news agency, all 26 provinces of Congo have registered mpox cases. But Health Minister Samuel-Roger Kamba said on Thursday that the country does not yet have a single dose of the vaccine and he called for “vigilance in all directions from all Congolese.
Dr Rachel Maguru, who heads the multi-epidemic centre at Goma’s North Kivu provincial hospital, said they also have no drugs or established treatments for mpox and are relying on other experts such as dermatologists to help where they can. A larger outbreak around the city and its many refugee camps already overloaded with an influx of people would be devastating, she said.
She also noted a crucial problem: Poor and displaced people have other priorities, such as earning enough to eat and survive. Aid agencies and struggling local authorities are already struggling to provide food, shelter and basic health care to the millions of displaced people, while also dealing with outbreaks of other diseases such as cholera.
(Only the headline and image of this report may have been edited by Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)