A more severe strain of mpox is circulating in Central Africa, the CDC said in an Aug. 7 outbreak alert.
The agency is advising clinicians to consider mpox as a possible diagnosis for patients who have recently been in the Democratic Republic of the Congo or its neighboring countries. The country is seeing its most widespread outbreak ever, the CDC said, amid high case rates of clade I mpox.
Multiple countries in central and eastern Africa are reporting outbreaks in addition to the Congo. They include Angola, Zambia, the Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, South Sudan and the Central African Republic.
The CDC recommends routine infection prevention and control practices during the ongoing, global outbreak of clade II mpox and this emerging clade I outbreak. The agency is also instructing clinicians to evaluate all patients traveling from these countries with laboratory testing, rather than clinical diagnosis alone.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesu, PhD, director-general of the World Health Organization, said in an Aug. 7 post on X he is convening an emergency committee on whether to declare this outbreak a public health emergency.