Mpox Is Spreading in Congo’s Capital, Threatening Global Efforts to Contain the Virus

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The detection of a new, fast-spreading strain of the virus in a remote mining town in eastern Congo led the World Health Organization to declare mpox a global public health emergency in August. Since then, its spread has only accelerated.

The virus is taking hold in crowded camps home to millions of displaced Congolese, who live crammed into rough shelters with limited access to water. And it has reached Congo’s cities, including its enormous, congested capital.

Belated efforts to control mpox in Kinshasa — by isolating patients and vaccinating their contacts — have been halting and haphazard, far outpaced by the speed of the virus’s spread and change.

Congo’s response to the emergency has been choked by bureaucracy; clinicians and others involved say privately that their leaders are locked in fights over access to an influx of international funds. The effort has been complicated by the country’s vast size and feeble infrastructure, and by the weakness of its health care system, whose workers are poorly and rarely paid.

A much-hyped vaccination campaign is unfolding at a glacial pace. Hundreds of thousands of vaccines sit in freezers, unused. Half of those infected are children, but not a single child has been vaccinated.

Only a fraction of mpox cases are confirmed with laboratory analysis. Few contacts of sick people are traced. And nowhere is the effort less effective than in Kinshasa, where two strains of the virus are now mingling within a particularly vulnerable population.

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