Spain will donate 500,000 Mpox vaccine doses to countries in central Africa suffering from a surge in cases, the government said Tuesday.
The doses amount to 20 percent of Spain’s total mpox vaccine reserves, the health ministry said in a statement without specifying which nations in the region will receive the vaccines or when they will arrive.
Spain also urged its European Union peers to follow suit and also donate 20 percent of their mbox vaccine stockpile, saying it” makes no sense to stockpile vaccines where there is no problem,” the statement added.
France and Germany have both announced they will each donate 100,000 mpox vaccine doses to countries suffering from the emergency.
Previously known as monkeypox, mpox is an infectious illness caused by a virus transferred to humans by infected animals. It can also be transmitted from human to human through close physical contact.
It causes fever, muscle pains and skin lesions and in an increasing number of cases, death.
The disease’s resurgence and the detection in the Democratic Republic of Congo of a new strain, dubbed Clade 1b, prompted the World Health Organisation to declare its highest international alert level on August 14.
Outbreaks have been reported in Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda since July 2024.
