Danish biotechnology company Bavarian Nordic announced that its mpox vaccine Jynneos had been approved by Singapore’s medicines regulator.
The vaccine was approved for the prevention of smallpox and mpox among people aged 18 years and older who are at high risk of the disease.
Meanwhile, scientists studying a new strain of mpox spreading from the Democratic Republic of Congo say the virus is changing faster than expected. There are many unknowns about the virus itself, the extent of its spread and how it is transmitted, complicating the response, scientists from Africa, Europe, and the United States have reported.
Mpox, formerly known as monkeypox, did not draw global attention until it spread globally in 2022. This prompted the World Health Organisation (WHO) to declare a global emergency, but the alert ended after 10 months.
However, a new strain of the virus, known as clade Ib, once again captured the world’s attention after WHO declared a new public health emergency. Typically, smallpox caused flu-like symptoms and purulent lesions and could lead to death.
More than 18,000 clade I and clade Ib mpox cases and 615 deaths have been reported in Congo this year, according to the WHO. In the last month, there have also been 222 confirmed cases of clade Ib in four African countries, as well as one case each in Sweden and Thailand in people who have travelled across Africa. The Philippine Department of Health reported 2 new cases of mpox on Monday.
Dr Dimie Ogoina, an infectious diseases expert at Niger Delta University Hospital in Nigeria who chairs the WHO’s mpox emergency committee, stated:
I worry that in Africa, we are working blindly. We don’t understand our outbreak very well, and if we don’t understand our outbreak very well, we will have difficulty addressing the problem in terms of transmission dynamics, the severity of the disease, risk factors of the disease. And I worry about the fact that the virus seems to be mutating and producing new strains.
Mpox mutates
Mpox is an orthopoxvirus, the same family that causes smallpox. The virus that causes smallpox is usually quite stable and slow to mutate, but APOBEC-induced mutations can speed up the evolution of the virus, Dr Miguel Paredes says.
All the human-to-human cases of mpox have this APOBEC signature of mutations, which means that it’s mutating a little bit more rapidly than we would expect.
Dr Salim Abdool Karim, a South African epidemiologist and chair of the Africa CDC’s mpox advisory committee, said that about half of cases in eastern Congo, where Ib was particularly prevalent, were diagnosed by doctors alone, without laboratory confirmation.
Delivering samples to laboratories is complicated, as the health system already faces pressure, he reports. About 750,000 people have been displaced due to fighting between the M23 rebel group and the government.
Many African laboratories could not get the materials they needed, Dr Emmanuel Nakoune, an mpox expert at the Institut Pasteur in Bangui, Central African Republic, said.
