Kenya to launch mpox vaccination drive as cases rise

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Kenya to launch mpox vaccination drive as cases rise

The east African country has now reported 370 cases of the virus in total, with 157 of those coming in the last six weeks

Kenya will begin a mass vaccination campaign next week to contain an accelerating outbreak of mpox, the Africa Centre for Disease Control has said.

The vaccination programme will initially target high-risk groups including frontline health workers and people with compromised immune systems in Mombasa, Busia and Nakuru counties.

Clade 1b mpox – a new variant of the disease that first emerged in the Democratic Republic of Congo – has been circulating in Kenya since July last year but the outbreak has worsened in recent weeks.

The east African country has now reported 370 cases of the virus in total, with 157 of those coming in the last six weeks, according to the latest update from the World Health Organization (WHO). At least seven people have died, giving a case fatality rate of about two per cent.

The surge in infections has set off alarm bells among health officials, who are anxious to stop the virus from exploding as it has in Sierra Leone and the DRC, where tens of thousands of people have been affected.

“We’ve seen it in Kinshasa, we’ve seen it in Freetown … at some point the increase can be quite exponential,” said Professor Yap Boum II, assistant manager of Africa CDC’s mpox incident management team, as he unveiled the plans for the vaccination campaign.

“Kenya is at this stage, one of, if not the country that is the most worrisome,” he told an Africa CDC briefing.

Kenya’s public health response has so far centred on maintaining public awareness and good surveillance in an attempt to monitor and slow the spread of the disease.

Generally, those with mpox are urged to seek treatment in medical centres, though some people have been allowed to isolate at home.

Prof Boum said that surveillance would continue to be of vital importance to the outbreak response.

“It is critical…the vaccination needs to go hand in hand with the surveillance,” he said.

The route of transmission
Some 10,700 doses of a third-generation mpox jab produced by Bavarian Nordic were delivered to Kenya earlier this year by Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, with the support of the Africa CDC, the US CDC, Unicef, and the World Health Organization (WHO).

Many of the mpox cases identified in Kenya have been traced back to a trunk road linking Mombasa, a major coastal city with a busy port, to Malaba, a town on the border with Uganda.

Just over half (56.3 per cent) of the cases confirmed in the first six months of Kenya’s Clade 1b outbreak were found among men working as lorry drivers, and it is thought that the virus is spreading through contact with sex workers in the port and along the road, according to an analysis from the US CDC in late June.

The virus also appears to have taken hold in the capital, Nairobi, which now accounts for around eight per cent of new cases.

Kenya is among 28 African countries that have suffered outbreaks of mpox since 2024.

The DRC has been hit the hardest. Since January last year it has reported 28,874 cases of Clade 1b mpox – the strain that prompted the WHO to declare a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) months later in August.

Clade 1b spread rapidly across neighbouring Central and East African countries including Rwanda, Burundi, and Uganda.

In West Africa, outbreaks of Clade IIb mpox, a less virulent strain but one that can still explode under the right circumstances, as it has in Sierra Leone, have also caused alarm.

Despite common misconceptions, people of all ages and sexual orientations are vulnerable to mpox, which initially presents itself with flu-like symptoms such as headaches and a fever before developing into the characteristic lesions that cover the body.

In severe cases, particularly when a patient has a compromised immune system, the body is unable to overcome the virus and new lesions continue to appear, raising the risk of secondary infections that can be fatal.

There is no specific antiviral treatment available for mpox, which was formerly known as monkeypox, so most patients are given painkillers to relieve the itching and antibiotics to fend off infections.


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