NPR In August 2024, the news came in quick succession. On Tuesday — Aug. 13, 2024 — Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declared mpox a public health emergency of continental concern. The very next day, the World Health Organization followed suit elevating the mpox outbreak to its highest threat level. We published a story with the headline: “WHO declares 2024 mpox surge a ‘public health emergency of international concern.’“
Today, those emergency declarations are still in effect but mpox has faded from the headlines. This story is a continuation of our annual series — “Whatever happened to …” — that follows up on previous reporting to see where things stand now. When Caroline Mugun shows up at work in Mombasa, Kenya, the patients are behind subdividers.
“You see the agony the patient goes through. It’s on another level,” she says.
Mugun works in an mpox isolation ward run by Doctors Without Borders, where patients stay as their painful lesions heal. The hope is to prevent the virus, which is contagious and spreads sexually and through close contact, from further expanding its reach. Before this outbreak, Kenya had never reported mpox cases before. Now, Africa CDC says the virus has shown up in Kenya’s capital and it worries cases could grow exponentially, as has happened in other urban centers.