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Geneva: Youngsters have been especially impacted by mpox outbreaks raging in Africa, with children under five accounting for nearly a third of the cases in Burundi, the UN children’s agency said Friday.
Burundi is the second hardest-hit country on the continent after the Democratic Republic of Congo.
“Children in Burundi are bearing the brunt of the mpox outbreak, with alarming rates of infection and severe health impacts,” said Paul Ngwakum, UNICEF’s Regional Health Adviser for Eastern and Southern Africa.
Ngwakum said two-thirds of cases in Burundi concerned people aged 19 and under.
“Of particular concern is the rise of mpox among children under five years of age, representing 30 percent of the reported cases,” he told reporters in Geneva, speaking via videolink from Bujumbura.
Mpox, previously known as monkeypox, is caused by a virus transmitted to humans by infected animals but can also be passed from human to human through close physical contact.
It causes fever, muscular aches and large boil-like skin lesions, and can in some cases be deadly.
The World Health Organization declared an international emergency last month, concerned by the surge in cases of the new clade 1b strain in the DRC that spread to nearby countries.
A total of 25,093 suspected mpox cases and 723 deaths were reported across the continent between January and September 8, WHO said.
Of those, 21,835 suspected cases and 717 deaths were reported in the DRC, while 1,489 suspected cases and no deaths have been reported in neighboring Burundi.
Research is still under way to discover how clade 1b compares to the original strain.
The outbreak in DRC has proved deadlier than previous mpox epidemics but this could be because the vulnerable populations in the conflict-torn country are now being affected.
“It may indeed be that it’s in a population who simply cannot respond immunologically to yet another threat,” WHO spokeswoman Margaret Harris told reporters Friday.
While no deaths have been registered in Burundi yet, Ngwakum stressed that many children in the region were already weakened by low immunity and underlying illnesses and “will need critical treatment to be able to avoid them from dying.”
The last time WHO declared a global health emergency over mpox was in 2022 when the original mpox clade 2 that had long been endemic in central Africa suddenly began spreading around the world.
That outbreak mainly impacted gay and bisexual men with more than 100,000 cases reported and 222 deaths, according to the WHO.
Ngwakum said the geographical area where the virus is spreading in Burundi remains limited.
With swift action “we can limit the spread, contain the virus, and potentially end the outbreak with no lives lost,” he said.
I “think this can be stopped within a very few weeks.”
UNICEF, he said, was urgently appealing for nearly $59 million to scale up responses across six African countries, including Burundi.
Immunization with vaccines originally developed for smallpox could help stem the spread.
WHO last week for the first time prequalified an mpox vaccine, the MVA-BN, and Ngwakum said UNICEF was working to procure doses for Burundi.
On Thursday, mpox vaccines were administered in Africa for the first time, with several hundred high-risk individuals receiving jabs in Rwanda.
The DRC has said it will begin its vaccination campaign on October 2.

Warsaw: The BBC and the independent Russian news site Mediazona said on Friday they had documented the deaths of around 70,000 Russian soldiers since the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The toll comes from publicly available information such as official statements, death notices in the media and announcements on social media, as well as tombstones in Russian cemeteries.
“We have identified the names of 70,112 Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine but the actual number is believed to be considerably higher,” the BBC said.
“Some families do not share details of their relatives’ deaths publicly — and our analysis does not include names we were unable to check, or the deaths of militia in Russian-occupied Donetsk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine,” the British broadcaster added.
The same two organizations had put the toll at 66,000 in mid-August.
Mediazona and another independent Russian news site, Meduza, have also analyzed official data from notaries on inheritance cases.
This has led them to estimate that the military death toll could be much higher — at 120,000.
The toll is considered secret in Russia.
Ukraine also communicates very little about losses for fear of demoralizing its citizens after more than two and a half years of Russia’s invasion.
In February, President Volodymyr Zelensky said around 31,000 Ukrainian soldiers had died, although analysts and observers have said they believe the real number to be much higher.
The Wall Street Journal reported this week that the war had killed or injured a total of one million soldiers on both sides.
“A confidential Ukrainian estimate from earlier this year put the number of dead Ukrainian troops at 80,000 and the wounded at 400,000, according to people familiar with the matter.
“Western intelligence estimates of Russian casualties vary, with some putting the number of dead as high as nearly 200,000 and wounded at around 400,000,” it said.