ADDIS ABABA: The head of Africa\u2019s health agency said the situation in the DRC city of Goma was a \u201cfull-scale public health emergency,\u201d warning that the fighting there could fuel major pandemics.
\nThe Rwanda-backed M23 armed group has been advancing across the Democratic Republic of Congo\u2019s volatile east, which has been the scene of numerous infectious disease outbreaks.
\nEarlier this week, M23 seized control of most of North Kivu\u2019s capital Goma, a densely populated city of three million people, one million of whom are displaced.
\nJean Kaseya, head of the African Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC), said it was these \u201cextreme conditions, combined with insecurity and mass displacement have fueled the mutation of the mpox virus.\u201d
\nThe clade 1b variant of mpox, which has been recorded in many countries across the world in recent months, first emerged in the neighboring South Kivu province in 2023.
\n\u201cGoma has become the epicenter, spreading mpox across 21 African countries,\u201d he said in a letter sent on Friday to African leaders.
\n\u201cThis is not only a security issue \u2014 it is a full-scale public health emergency,\u201d Kaseya said.
\n\u201cThis war must end. If decisive action is not taken, it will not be bullets alone that claim lives \u2014 it will be the unchecked spread of major outbreaks and potential pandemics that will come from this fragile region… devastating economies and societies across our continent,\u201d he said.
\nThe conditions had also led to \u201cwidespread measles, cholera and other outbreaks, claiming thousands more lives.\u201d
\nThe conflict in the eastern DRC is a dramatic escalation in a region that has seen decades of conflict involving multiple armed groups, which over the past three decades have claimed an estimated six million lives.
\nInternational observers have sounded the alarm on the humanitarian impact of the escalating conflict.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
ADDIS ABABA: The head of Africa\u2019s health agency said the situation in the DRC city of Goma was a \u201cfull-scale public health emergency,\u201d warning that the fighting there could fuel major pandemics. The Rwanda-backed M23 armed group has been advancing across the Democratic Republic of Congo\u2019s volatile east, which has been the scene of numerous …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":76423,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-76393","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76393","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76393"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76393\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":76426,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76393\/revisions\/76426"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/76423"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76393"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76393"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}