A new variant of the Mpox virus is currently spreading in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), according to experts in the field. This variant is a descendant of the more lethal clade 1a strain of Mpox, which is estimated to cause up to 10 percent of deaths in infected patients. The new variant carries a mutation known as APOBEC3, which significantly increases its transmissibility, similar to the previous clade 1b Mpox strain that has spread to the UK, Europe, and Asia over the past year. The confirmation of the particular infectivity of the new variant has come from Ngashi Ngongo, head of the Mpox Incident Management Team at the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC). Despite the concerns of experts, which are partly supported by a recent study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the mortality rate is found to be contingent on concomitant factors characterising the basic conditions of the affected population, with malnutrition being the foremost among them, according to Lorenzo Subissi, a virologist with the WHO Health Emergencies Programme.
The emergence of the novel mutant strain coincided with the WHO’s declaration of the present Mpox epidemic as a ‘public health emergency of international concern,’ with a minimum of 1,000 fatalities in Africa since the onset of the epidemic and the dissemination of the variants in countries such as the UK, US, Sweden, Thailand, India, and Germany.
