Cases continue to climb sharply in Sierra Leone, and the head of the Africa Centre for Disease Control (Africa CDC) said the surge is a major focus of the outbreak response, partly to prevent the virus from spreading to other West African countries.
At Africa CDC's weekly update today, Director-General Jean Kaseya, MD, MPH, said 611 cases were reported in the most recent week, up from 483 the previous week. The country's hot spots are six districts in West Area Urban and West Area Rural states, which include Freetown, the country’s capital. Of confirmed cases, males account for 68% in the outbreak driven by clade 2b, which is the strain circulating globally.
Challenges with contract tracing
Kaseya said the country has good test coverage and a good testing rate, but contact tracing has been a challenge, with only two contacts identified on average for each case. Vaccination is under way, with more than 30,000 people immunized in the past 2 weeks.
Mpox activity in Sierra Leone made up 58.2% of all cases in Africa last week, with cases in the four mainly affected countries contributing 98.1% of cases. Besides Sierra Leone, the other hard-hit countries are the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Uganda, and Burundi. Cases in "Burundi and Uganda were up slightly last week, but show an overall continued decline," Kaseya said. "We are still in the middle of this public health emergency of continental security"
Cases have stabilized in the DRC, a finding that Africa CDC said should be interpreted with caution due to low but increasing testing coverage. Much of the country's activity had been occurring in the conflict areas of North Kivu and South Kivu provinces, and as the situation calms down, vaccination is resuming, as is the deployment of outbreak response teams.
More vaccine doses needed
Kaseya said vaccine deployment is helping reduce the spread of the virus in Uganda, and immunization recently began in Angola with vaccine sent from Spain.
He said African countries need more vaccine doses, and African populations are eagerly accepting vaccination, with about 1.3 million doses administered so far. Health officials have projected they need about 6.4 million doses by August.
Looking ahead, Kaseya said vaccine is needed to immunize at-risk groups in Africa's endemic countries to blunt the impact of any new mutated strains that emerge from spillovers and human circulation in the future.
