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Weekly Bulletin on Outbreaks and other Emergencies: Week 36: 29 August - 4 September 2022

Countries
Algeria
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WHO
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Overview

This Weekly Bulletin focuses on public health emergencies occurring in the WHO African region. This week’s articles cover:

Monkey pox in the WHO African Region

Yellow fever in West, Central and East Africa

COVID-19 in the African Region

For each of these events, a brief description, followed by public health measures implemented and an interpretation of the situation is provided.

A table is provided at the end of the bulletin with information on all new and ongoing public health events currently being monitored in the region, as well as recent events that have been controlled and closed.

Major issues and challenges include:

The number of confirmed monkeypox cases has drastically increased within the past week.
Eleven countries have confirmed monkeypox outbreaks in Africa since the start of the outbreak.
All cases reported in the past week are from three countries that previously notified monkeypox cases; Ghana, Nigeria and Morocco. WHO continues to provide the necessary support to improve surveillance and laboratory capacity, including genomic surveillance in affected countries. The immunization coverage for yellow fever has been suboptimal in most of the countries in the WHO African region prone to yellow fever and in specific populations. According to WHO and UNICEF estimates, in 2021, the routine childhood vaccination immunization coverage for yellow fever in the African region was 47%. This is much lower than the 80% threshold required to confer population immunity against yellow fever, indicating that a large population remains susceptible to yellow fever with a risk of continued transmission. Furthermore, many countries in West, Central, and East Africa have been facing political instability and insecurity, in addition to concurrent outbreaks (including COVID-19, Ebola virus disease, cholera, meningitis, malaria, monkeypox, chikungunya, plague, Lassa fever, etc.). These could contribute to delayed case investigation and hinder the surveillance and response efforts against yellow fever.