A new monkeypox (Mpox) variant has been found in the Eastern DRC. It is believed to have been hosted by wild animals before infecting humans and mutating to permit it to transmit its virus among people.
How exactly that happened remains a mystery, a food for medical practitioners to ponder and resolve.
In the meantime, there is an acknowledgement that prostitution, beliefs in witchcraft and lack of medical care have joined forces to create a global epidemic.
This article reviews the issues at stake in this matter. The discovery of a new Mpox variant was accidental.
The new strain of Mpox in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is called “clade 1b”. This strain is a new offshoot of clade 1, and it causes a more severe disease than clade 2.
The clade 1b strain has spread rapidly in the DRC and neighbouring countries, including Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, and Uganda.
This year, the DRC and Burundi account for 92% of all Mpox cases in Africa.
The World Health Organization (WHO) declared a new health emergency on August 14, 2024, due to the clade 1b strain. The WHO has deployed experts to the DRC to help with the outbreak.
Mpox is a disease caused by the monkeypox virus. It’s transmitted through close contact with an infected person or animal, including skin-to-skin contact, face-to-face interactions, and contact with contaminated objects or surfaces.
Common symptoms include rashes, lesions, and pain. Most patients recover within a month, but some people get very sick and die.
Severe cases of Mpox can afflict its victims with ocular degeneration and other complications, including blurry vision and milky, misshapen pupils.
How Mpox is transmitted is another issue under investigation.
It is known that semen was found to carry the Mpox virus and generally human fluids.
Severe, painful lesions have been found to cling onto genitals, including other parts of the skin.
It is sex workers who live in Kamituga village that were thought to spread the disease among mainly gold miners and their staff.
As a result, there is a considerable stigma attached to Mpox similar to the one seen on HIV and Aids.
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Infected adults delay seeking help because society ostracizes them as engaging in reckless, unprotected sex, but children, too, were found to be infected at an alarming rate.
The conclusion was fluid contact with Mpox-infected people may explain why children picked Mpox. How Mpox spread is another area filled with unknown factors.
While Mpox is contagious and hence spreads by infected human fluid, it is unclear how it passed from wild animals to humans and how it mutates to be able to infect humans after successfully moving from wild animals to humans.
It is suggested that Mpox may have jumped from rodents into humans. Still, since Eastern DRC is known for eating gorillas, chimpanzees, bats, and monkeys, it could also be a mode of transmission.
In the Eastern DRC, it is common to find markets replete with pieces of mutilated gorilla parts being displayed for sale.
Parts such as hands, feet, torso, heads, etc, are sold, and there are many willing buyers.
The concern is whether or not those gorillas were infected and whether they could not have passed the Mpox to humanity.
Then, there is an issue of bat eating habits. Bats, too, have been associated with Mpox, so the possibility of infecting humans cannot be underestimated.
Beliefs in witchcraft delay seeking medical help as patients head to witch doctors who themselves become in the high-risk group to get infected or transmit Mpox at the same level as sex workers.
Witch doctors rub with their hands traditional herbs into the bodies of infected patients without wearing protective gear.
As a result, they are exposed to the Mpox virus.
Once infected, the witch doctors tend to believe rivals have bewitched them, and instead of going to seek medical help, they dig deep into traditional healing, where the situation gets worse and worse.
In the meantime, new patients who seek their sorcery stand a chance of getting infected with Mpox.
As mpox spread, as in the case of Kamituga village in the Eastern DRC, medical practitioners accidentally stumbled on it!
At the beginning, Mpox was confused with smallpox.
However, as patients did not heal fast, fears of dealing with a new disease grew. From the symptoms depicted by patients, the practitioners began to suspect Mpox rather than smallpox had attacked the patients.
Since the authorities from Kinshasa’s protective gear neglect the East DRC, Mpox testing and treatment are lacking.
In the earlier stages of containing the epidemic, it was common for the practitioners also to become infected and struggle to get the help they needed.
The situation is different as global efforts through the WHO have improved medical care.
Now, Mpox testing is done in a few days, while previously samples had to be taken to Goma, a journey throttled by bad roads and poor shipping services to navigate Lake Kivu on the way to Goma was once the only place mpox could be tested.
Mpox has been baptised “Mambegeti” which are the buckets used to carry bottles of beers.
Its association with liquor sipping adds a connection to prostitutes and prompts the stigma attached to it.
It is considered about 1,200 people have died from the epidemic, which is roughly 2.5% of the people infected.
The epidemic has spread globally and has attracted the world’s attention on how to eradicate it.
Before the epidemic was known, almost everybody was not vaccinated against Mpox, but now, over 50,000 people have been vaccinated with a new vaccine.
Could the new vaccine be being tested in Africa to establish its efficacy and associated side effects, or has the epidemic left us with few options?
True, the side effects of the Mpox vaccination now being used in the DRC and elsewhere remain a grey area.
However, it was reported pregnant women who were infected were having miscarriages and stillbirths.
It is a nightmare that left the communities in a state of hopelessness.
Gold miners have been adding fire into the furnace because they fuel the prostitution business.
That may explain why the epidemic spread so fast, with Burundi, Kenya, Tanzania, and Rwanda recorded as its latest conquests.
Mpox has also moved to infected people in far-flung countries such as Australia, New Zealand, France, the UK, and the US, among other nations, qualifying it as a global epidemic.
In the developed world, homosexuality has been associated with Mpox more than heterosexuality for reasons which are not clear.
Just like the earlier days of HIV and Aids seem to repeat once more, but Mpox is indiscriminate and moves through fluids, not necessarily from sex like HIV, but even through non-sexual contact with an infected person.
So far, more than 62,000 people have been hit by Mpox in Africa, with three-quarters of those hailing from the DRC.
Mpox was declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) on August 14 by WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and a Public Health Emergency of Continental Security (PHECS) on August 13 by Africa CDC Director-General Jean Kaseya.
