According to Ken Limwame, the Social and Behavioral Change (SBC) Lead at Africa CDC, the study comes amid growing concerns about vaccine hesitancy and doubts, especially as more vaccines are added to the national immunization schedule.
Dr Ngashi Ngongo, the Mpox incident Commander at Africa CDC says Togo, Ghana and Ethiopia are among the countries that reported their first cases in May, and Ethiopia has already recorded one death of an infant.
According to Africa CDC, implementation will be phased. The first phase that runs between 2025 and 2026 will focus on updating national health financing plans in 30 countries, piloting innovative revenue mechanisms, and launching transparency dashboards. The second phase that runs from 2026 to 2030 will scale successful approaches, with the goal of enabling at least 20 countries to finance 50 percent or more of their health budgets through sustainable domestic sources.
According to Dr. Mosoka Fallah, the Acting Director of the Science and Innovation Directorate at the Africa Centers for Disease Control (Africa CDC), Uganda initially received 2,160 doses to kick-start the study. Further shipments are expected as researchers work to determine the vaccine’s ability to prevent transmission among high-risk individuals.
Mpox samples are primarily tested at the Uganda Virus Research Institute (UVRI) laboratory in Entebbe and the National Public Health Laboratory in Butabika but Boum reports some samples are stuck in the districts and not reaching their destination.
Kaseya says driving from the capital Kinshasa to the affected district takes three days of juggling the poor road network reporting they had received reports that samples earlier collected were poorly preserved and therefore cannot be used.
The countries are the Central African Republic, Cote d’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, Liberia, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa and Uganda. The largest number of doses – 85% of the allocation – will go to the Democratic Republic of the Congo as the most affected country, reporting four out of every five laboratory-confirmed cases in Africa this year.
Mpox, a disease caused by monkeypox virus, has so far spread to 18 countries in Africa including Uganda where the Ministry of Health recently declared that two positive individuals had been confirmed positive after they entered the country from the neighboring DR Congo.
This was revealed by scientists attending a meeting organized by the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to exchange the latest clinical and scientific data with a team from Moderna, one of the COVID-19 vaccines that are currently approved under emergency use criteria.
Dr. Lul Riek a Public Health expert based at the Africa CDC said the continent needs to have reached between 60 and 70% of the population by end of 2022 if hard immunity is to be achieved.
This trial which is so far the largest to be conducted on the continent to identify early COVID-19 treatments that can prevent progression to severe disease and potentially limit transmission has established sites at Makerere and Kabale universities in Uganda.
Kaleebu who was commenting on the deliberations at the meeting told URN that already UVRI is in early stages of working on a Messenger RNA vaccine but their biggest challenge like elsewhere is having to rely on foreign funding.
A large proportion of information shared on online media platforms since the pandemic started global agencies say is inaccurate and misleading and continues to be shared by social media users intentionally or unknowingly every day.
The study dubbed ANTIVOC is launching at 19 sites across 13 countries where 2000 to 3000 patients with mild infection will be enrolled on various treatments to test their safety and efficacy in preventing the disease from progressing into severe state. The countries involved are Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Equatorial Guinea, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guinea, Kenya, Mali, Mozambique, Sudan, and Uganda.
