I find it highly weird that reporting around MPox and Ebola skirts around the most relevant information. People in Congo have a culture of hugging the dead and dying, and so those diseases spread. Children are now dying.
That’s it, that’s the whole story. And the reason why it doesn’t spread terribly much further, aside from gay men seemingly not resisting having sex with men covered in lesions.
The latest strain of MPox spreads more easily (that is the nature of viruses, they want to spread), and it has gone beyond intimacy and mere contact is a factor. Which means Ebola-type spreading instead of HIV-type spreading.
Other problems include over-crowded hospitals, and no vaccines being distributed, which is presumably a combination of a lack of care/cash from WHO, and the local governments, who are dealing with other issues like HIV.
Children in the DRC are also nearly four times more likely to die from mpox than adults, with WHO data showing that the case fatality ratio for children under the age of one is 8.6%, compared to 2.4% in people aged 15 and over. Of the deaths reported by May 2024, 62% were children under 5 years old, the same data shows.