Dr Samuel Boland, WHO incident manager for mpox, told the BBC that more than 96% of all new mpox cases were currently in DR Congo, Uganda and Rwanda.
While confirming DR Congo had turned a corner, he warned it was too soon to be sure the outbreak was over.
“In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, we’ve actually seen, to some extent, a plateauing in the number of mpox cases, but collectively, it still is a very significantly affected country globally,” he said.
In fact, more than 90% of those who have died of mpox worldwide this year have been in DR Congo.
Although exact figures are unknown as only 77 deaths have been confirmed in the laboratory as there are not many testing centres available in certain areas of the continent.
“And so there remains a very, very strong need to make sure that we continue intervening at pace and at scale, even in places where we see that there may not be an escalation of cases at this moment in time,” Dr Boland said.
“Though overall, we might see a shift in the transmission in some places, we do again, still see escalation in others – and so we’re not out of the woods yet.”
Vaccination programmes have started elsewhere in Africa too, including in Nigeria and DR Congo’s neighbour Rwanda.
Dr Kaseya said the Africa CDC had not seen any notable changes week-on-week over the past month in the DR Congo and warned that it was too early to say the mpox outbreak was under control.
With every effort to conduct vaccinations, reinforce surveillance and laboratory systems “maybe by mid-January to February we’ll start to see a decrease in the cases of infection and deaths”.
WHO Director-General, Tedros Ghebreyesus said there is an urgent need for a coordinated global response.
The outbreak has now spread beyond Africa, with cases reported in the UK, US, Sweden, India, Germany, Thailand and Pakistan.
