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This Mpox Outbreak Isn't Like the Last One

The strain of mpox behind the current global health emergency is believed to be up to 10 times deadlier than the one that swept the globe in 2022.

Meanwhile, Titanji says, ramping up viral surveillance among the African nations who had been battling a steady rise in mpox cases for the past four decades soon slipped down the priority list, allowing a potentially more problematic variant to emerge undetected. Last month, Nachega and others published a paper in the journal Nature Medicine demonstrating how an outbreak of mpox began in the small mining town of Kamituga in eastern DRC through sex workers before being transmitted to nearby Rwanda, Uganda, and Burundi as the infected individuals returned home to visit their families. Earlier this month, both Bavarian Nordic and the European Commission's Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Authority announced a collaboration which will see 215,000 vaccine doses donated to the African continent, but Nachega says that this is a mere fraction of the number required to truly suppress the outbreak.

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