Health officials facing depleted vaccine supplies are also tracking upticks in Nigeria, Liberia, Kenya, and Ghana, as well as in Togo and Mozambique.
The test the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention uses to identify clade I mpox cases is 'most likely not reliable' for detection of the substrain identified in the study, the authors say.
Another mpox study today showed that dose-sparing vaccine administration of the Jynneos vaccine appeared to have worked.
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The cases were reported in northern Mozambique near the Tanzanian border.
Despite declines in 2 high-burden countries, cases are rising in Burundi, Uganda, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, and Guinea.
Though the surge in Sierra Leone has received much of the attention, cases are also rising in two other countries in West Africa: Ghana and Liberia.
Scientists estimate a precurser to the 2022 strain first emerged in Nigeria in August 2014 and spread to 11 Nigerian states before human infections were detected in 2017.
Population density and tourism are among factors driving infections in Sierra Leone, which made up 53% of mpox illnesses in Africa last week.
HHS received a list of 100 ways it could better prepare for and respond to public health emergencies such as pandemics.
Amid an ongoing vaccine shortage, more doses are arriving this week from Japan and France.
Togo's outbreak brings Africa's number of affected countries to 25, amid exponential spread in Sierra Leone.
The ARTIC 2.0 project will expand use of a low-cost, real-time genome sequencing technique used to detect COVID-19 variants to conduct surveillance on a wider variety of pathogens.
On viral culture, 4 of 21 environmental samples (19%) contained infectious virus.