There Are Now Over 50,000 People With Mpox Clade 1b, In Central Africa... Tough News -- Over 2,500 New Cases In Last Week...

This is indeed tough news, even if some of these 2,500 "new" cases are more the result of clearing backlogs -- finally having enough PCR test kits on the ground, to verify the afflicted's status -- by testing blood samples (some perhaps drawn weeks ago).

The 34 new deaths are also primarily among very young children. This all was a largely avoidable tragedy. Please ignore every word out of Kennedy Jr.'s mouth -- about vaccines. Had the WHO continued to fund vaccines for small-pox in children for the past 20 or so years, it is a near certainty that this outbreak would have been -- at most -- forty or so cases. . . continent wide. We've written on this before: older adults (who were vaccinated in the 1980s and earlier for smallpox) are largely immune to this Mpox outbreak.

But not so, the children who were never vaccinated (as WHO felt smallpox had been eradicated from the Earth, and stopped spending for a vaccine it thought no one needed, any longer). But it turns out that it would have provided some immunity to these Mpox outbreaks. [Dammit. Again -- please tell RFK Jr. to sit down and shut up.] In any event, here's the latest, from the Univeristy of Minnesota's CIDRAP researchers:

. . .Last week African countries reported 2,532 new mpox cases, mostly in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Burundi, pushing the total since the first of the year to 50,840 cases, officials from Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) said today.

The officials also reported 32 more deaths from the virus. At the briefing, Jean Kaseya, MD, MPH, Africa CDC's director-general, said cases continue to rise in Uganda and the outbreak has spread to one more district of Central African Republic (CAR), Paoua, which is on the border with Chad. . . .

We shall hold a good thought -- that people will stand with the clearly demonstrated bio-science, in favor of vaccines -- as safe and effective. Another pandemic is only as far away as the next largely unvaccinated population / generation in a country. Out.

नमस्ते