One person died from MPox in Ivory Coast: authorities

Abidjan: Ivorian health authorities on Tuesday reported 28 cases of mpox, including one death, from the virus that has killed hundreds in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The total number of cases has risen from six announced on 1 August.

Daouda Coulibaly, a doctor at the National Institute of Public Health (INHP), said that as of Tuesday, the country had recorded “28 confirmed cases, including one death.”

The death and several other cases occurred in Abidjan, the country’s economic capital, the INHP ​​said. Coulibaly said tests were being carried out to identify the strain of the latest mpox case.

“There is no need to panic about the current situation,” Coulibaly said. “We are only seeing the beginning of a new wave of the epidemic, and the number of cases has not yet surged.”

He said monitoring of mpox has been stepped up.

“We must break the chains of transmission, identify the contacts of the cases, isolate and monitor them.”

The cases detected in the West African country this year belong to the subtype that circulated during the last outbreak in 2022, called clade 2.

A more contagious and deadly subtype, known as subtype 1b, has appeared in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda and Sweden.

More than 500 people have died from a form of malaria in the Democratic Republic of Congo this year, and the World Health Organization last week declared the disease a global public health emergency.