MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
The World Health Organization declared mpox a public health emergency of international concern today. Now, this is the second time in two years that mpox, which was previously known as monkeypox - second time it has been designated an emergency. This time, it is a new type of the virus that is spreading. NPR's Gabrielle Emanuel joins me now. Hey there.
GABRIELLE EMANUEL, BYLINE: Hi. Good to be here.
KELLY: So you and I just talked two days ago.
EMANUEL: Yes.
KELLY: You were just on the show. You were here reporting then that the CDC in Africa was about to make an emergency declaration. Now we have the World Health Organization. Catch us up.
EMANUEL: Yes, so that was the first time Africa's CDC has ever made such a declaration. But the WHO has a bigger megaphone. And this is the highest level of concern for a health outbreak. We have only had seven of these before. So COVID was one, Zika a few years back, Ebola. This is essentially a wake-up call to the world to start paying attention to mpox.
KELLY: Let's talk about where. There have been cases of mpox detected in a number of countries, including in the U.S. But the real concern now is Africa. What is the situation?
EMANUEL: Yes, so the vast majority of cases are in the Democratic Republic of Congo. And cases have been rising there for years, but two things are alarming officials. The first, cases have started showing up in nearby countries that never reported mpox cases before, Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, a lot of cases in Burundi. And the virus is following somewhat worrisome patterns that actually look a lot like what we saw in the HIV pandemic, where it's spreading through sexual networks and along trucking routes. Here is Dimie Ogoina. He chaired the WHO's emergency committee that recommended the declaration.
DIMIE OGOINA: Long distance truck drivers have also been exposed and also had confirmed cases moving from one country to the other.
EMANUEL: Now, the other worrisome thing here is that the virus is evolving so that traditional diagnostic tests aren't able to pick it up. Now, there are ways to identify it, but it is not as easy as you would want.
KELLY: That sounds like yet another worrisome thing that we - how would we even know what the scale of the outbreak is if it's so hard to detect?
EMANUEL: That's exactly right. It's very hard to figure it out. So here's what we do know. The DRC has reported 14,000 cases so far this year by other types of testing, and some by looking at the painful skin lesions that the virus causes. There have been more than 500 deaths, but the WHO thinks these numbers are just the tip of the iceberg.
KELLY: What is needed to contain it?
EMANUEL: Well, right now in the DRC and in other countries in Africa, there's very limited testing. There are no treatments anywhere and no vaccines on the ground there. So once vaccines get there, it will be a very hard rollout because of basic logistics - we're talking remote areas - and also because the virus is changing. Here is the WHO's Maria Van Kerkhove.
MARIA VAN KERKHOVE: We need a much better understanding of the epidemiology in the affected countries, in the at-risk countries. We need to understand the transmission patterns. We need to understand the populations that are at risk and its dynamic.
EMANUEL: So they need that information to figure out what to do with limited doses. We're talking - they need 10 million doses. We're talking hundreds of thousands of doses that are going to be available soon. So the WHO has made an appeal for $15 million. There's a lot to go to get this virus under control.
KELLY: NPR's Gabrielle Emanuel. Thank you.
EMANUEL: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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