European governments must show strong political commitment to eliminate mpox while standing in solidarity with Africa, a top official of the UN World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Tuesday.

Briefing journalists in Geneva, Hans Kluge, WHO regional director for Europe, insisted mpox is “not the ‘new COVID’” and that the risk from mpox to the general population was “low.”

He rejected comparisons between the fast-spreading viral disease, which the agency declared an international public health emergency last week, and the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to him, regardless of whether it’s mpox clade 1, behind the ongoing outbreak in east-central Africa, or mpox clade 2, behind the 2022 outbreak that initially impacted Europe and has continued to circulate in Europe since.

The UN health agency official’s reply to whether Europe would experience COVID-19-like lockdowns was an unequivocal “no.”

Speaking via video link from Copenhagen, Mr Kluge recalled that the 2022 European mpox outbreak was brought under control “thanks to the direct engagement with the most affected communities of men who have sex with men.”

He cited “behaviour change, non-discriminatory public health action and mpox vaccination” as success factors in Europe in 2022. However, he said the region “failed to go the last mile” to quash the disease and is currently seeing some 100 new mpox clade II cases every month.

Last week, Sweden became the first country outside Africa to record a case of the mpox clade I variant at the centre of the latest outbreak, which has been spreading from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to neighbouring countries.

The Swedish case concerned a person who had travelled to an affected area of Africa.

The current state of alert due to clade 1, considered more severe, allows European health authorities to strengthen focus on clade 2 and eliminate it “once and for all,” Mr Kluge urged.

The UN health agency representative called for European solidarity with Africa, notably regarding equitable vaccine access. WHO recommends using the MVA-BN or LC16 vaccines or the ACAM2000 vaccine when the others are unavailable. These have originally been developed against the now-eradicated disease smallpox.

WHO spokesperson Tarik Jašarević said the producer of MVA-BN, Bavarian Nordic, “has capacity to manufacture 10 million doses by end of 2025 and can already supply up to two million doses this year.”

As for LC16, which is a vaccine produced on behalf of the Government of Japan, he underscored that there is a “considerable” stockpile of this vaccine.

(NAN)