Congo’s humanitarian crisis helped mpox spiral again into a global health emergency

Patients listen to a doctor outside the consultation room of the Mpox treatment centre at Nyiragongo General Referral Hospital, north of Goma on August 17, 2024. (AFP)
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Updated 18 August 2024
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Congo’s humanitarian crisis helped mpox spiral again into a global health emergency

  • Millions are thought to be out of reach of medical help or advice in the conflict-torn east, where dozens of rebel groups have been fighting Congolese army forces for years over mineral-rich areas, causing a huge displacement crisis

GOMA, Congo: Sarah Bagheni had a headache, fever, and itchy and unusual skin lesions for days, but she had no inkling that her symptoms might have been caused by mpox and that she might be another case in a growing global health emergency.
She also has no idea where to go to get medical help.
She and her husband live in the Bulengo displacement camp in eastern Congo, a region that is effectively ground zero for a series of mpox outbreaks in Africa.
This year’s alarming rise in cases, including a new form of the virus identified by scientists in eastern Congo, led the World Health Organization to declare it a global health emergency on Wednesday. It said the new variant could spread beyond the five African countries where it had already been detected — a timely warning that came a day before Sweden reported its first case of the new strain.
In the vast central African nation of Congo, which has had more than 96 percent of the world’s roughly 17,000 recorded cases of mpox this year — and some 500 deaths from the disease — many of the most vulnerable seem unaware of its existence or the threat that it poses.
“We know nothing about this,” Bagheni’s husband, Habumuremyiza Hire, said Thursday about mpox. “I watch her condition helplessly because I don’t know what to do. We continue to share the same room.”
Millions are thought to be out of reach of medical help or advice in the conflict-torn east, where dozens of rebel groups have been fighting Congolese army forces for years over mineral-rich areas, causing a huge displacement crisis. Hundreds of thousands of people like Bagheni and her husband have been forced into overcrowded refugee camps around Goma, while more have taken refuge in the city.
Conditions in the camps are dire and medical facilities are almost nonexistent.
Mahoro Faustin, who runs the Bulengo camp, said that about three months ago, administrators first started noticing people in the camp exhibiting fever, body aches and chills — symptoms that could signal malaria, measles or mpox.
There is no way of knowing how many mpox cases there might be in Bulengo because of a lack of testing, he said. There haven’t been any recent health campaigns to educate the tens of thousands of people in the camp about mpox, and Faustin said he’s worried about how many people might be undiagnosed.
“Just look at the overcrowding here,” he said, pointing to a sea of ramshackle tents. “If nothing is done, we will all be infected here, or maybe we are already all infected.”
Around 70 percent of the new mpox cases in the Goma area in the last two months that were registered at a treatment center run by Medair were from displacement camps, said Dr. Pierre Olivier Ngadjole, the international aid group’s health adviser in Congo. The youngest of those cases was a month-old baby and the oldest a 90-year-old, he said.
In severe cases of mpox, people can develop lesions on the face, hands, arms, chest and genitals. While the disease originated in animals, the virus has in recent years been spreading between people via close physical contact, including sex.
Bagheni’s best hope of getting a diagnosis for her lesions is a government hospital that’s a two-hour drive away. That’s likely out of the question, given that she already struggles with mobility having previously had both her legs amputated.
Seven million people are internally displaced in Congo, with more than 5.5 million of them in the country’s east, according the UN refugee agency. Congo has the largest displacement camp population in Africa, and one of the largest in the world.
The humanitarian crisis in eastern Congo has almost every possible complication when it comes to stopping an mpox outbreak, said Dr. Chris Beyrer, director of Duke University’s Global Health Institute.
That includes war, illicit mining industries that attract sex workers, transient populations near border regions, and entrenched poverty. He also said the global community missed multiple warning signs.
“We’re paying attention to it now, but mpox has been spreading since 2017 in Congo and Nigeria,” Beyrer said, adding that experts have long been calling for vaccines to be shared with Africa, but to little effect. He said the WHO’s emergency declaration was “late in coming,” with more than a dozen countries already affected.
Beyrer said that unlike COVID-19 or HIV, there’s a good vaccine and good treatments and diagnostics for mpox, but “the access issues are worse than ever” in places like eastern Congo.
In 2022, there were outbreaks in more than 70 countries around the world, including the United States, which led the WHO to also declare an emergency that lasted until mid-2023. It was largely shut down in wealthy countries within months through the use of vaccines and treatments, but few doses have been made available in Africa.
The new and possibly more infectious strain of mpox was first detected this year in a mining town in eastern Congo, about 450 kilometers (280 miles) south of Goma. It’s unclear how much the new strain is to blame, but Congo is now enduring its worst outbreak yet and at least 13 African countries have recorded cases, four of them for the first time.
The outbreaks in those four countries — Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda — have been linked to Congo’s, and Doctors Without Borders said Friday that Congo’s surge “threatens a major spread of the disease” to other countries.
Salim Abdool Karim, an infectious disease expert who chairs the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s emergency committee, said the Congo outbreak has a particularly concerning change, in that it’s disproportionately affecting young people. Children under 15 account for 70 percent of cases and 85 percent of all deaths in the country, the Africa CDC reported.
Unlike the 2022 global outbreak, which predominantly affected gay and bisexual men, mpox now appears to be spreading in heterosexual populations.
All of Congo’s 26 provinces have recorded mpox cases, according to the state-run news agency. But Health Minister Samuel-Roger Kamba said Thursday that the country doesn’t have a single vaccine dose yet and he pleaded for “vigilance in all directions from all Congolese.”
Dr. Rachel Maguru, who heads the multi-epidemic center at Goma’s North Kivu provincial hospital, said they also don’t have drugs or any established treatments for mpox and are relying on other experts such as dermatologists to help where they can. A larger outbreak around the city and its numerous displacement camps already overburdened with an influx of people would be “terrible,” she said.
She also noted a pivotal problem: poor and displaced people have other priorities, like earning enough money to eat and survive. Aid agencies and stretched local authorities are already wrestling with providing food, shelter and basic health care to the millions displaced, while also dealing with outbreaks of other diseases like cholera.
 

 


Police detain 8 people after anti-migrant clashes in Spanish town

Updated 3 sec ago
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Police detain 8 people after anti-migrant clashes in Spanish town

MADRID: Eight people have been detained by police in Spain in relation to violent clashes that erupted between far-right groups, local residents and migrants in a southeastern town over the weekend, officials said on Monday.
Clashes in Torre-Pacheco in the Murcia region took place on Saturday night after an elderly resident was beaten up earlier in the week by unknown assailants, which led to a call by far-right groups to seek retribution on the area’s large migrant community.
The motivation for the initial attack was not clear.
Among those detained were two people allegedly linked to the attack on the elderly man and several others in relation to the weekend clashes, Mariola Guevara, the central government’s representative in Murcia, said Monday on X.
Six Spaniards and one North African resident were detained for the assaults, damages and disturbances, Guevara said. The two others detained had helped the perpetrator of the attack on the elderly man, she said.
A major police presence was moved into Torre-Pacheco, which has a population of roughly 42,000. About a third of its residents are of foreign origin, according to local government figures.
Large numbers of migrants also work in the surrounding area as day laborers in agriculture, a major driver of the regional economy.


German doctor goes on trial for 15 murders

Updated 47 min 50 sec ago
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German doctor goes on trial for 15 murders

  • Palliative care specialist alleged to have killed 12 women and three men between September 2021 and July 2024 while working in Berlin
  • The case recalls that of notorious German nurse Niels Hoegel, who was handed a life sentence in 2019 for murdering 85 patients

BERLIN: A German doctor went on trial Monday accused of killing 15 patients with lethal injections and acting as “master of life and death” over those in his care.

The 40-year-old palliative care specialist, named by German media as Johannes M., is alleged to have killed 12 women and three men between September 2021 and July 2024 while working in Berlin.

The doctor is accused of injecting the victims, aged between 25 and 94, with deadly cocktails of sedatives and in some cases setting fire to their homes in a bid to cover up his crimes.

The accused had “visited his patients under the pretext of providing medical care,” prosecutor Philipp Meyhoefer said at the opening of the trial at the state court in Berlin.

Johannes M. had organized “home visits, already with the intention of killing” and exploited his patients’ trust in him as a doctor, Meyhoefer said.

“He acted with disregard for life... and behaved as the master of life and death.”

A co-worker first raised the alarm over Johannes M. last July after becoming suspicious that so many of his patients had died in fires, according to Die Zeit newspaper.

He was arrested in August, with prosecutors initially linking him to four deaths.

But subsequent investigations uncovered a host of other suspicious cases, and in April prosecutors charged Johannes M. with 15 counts of murder.

A further 96 cases were still being investigated, a prosecution spokesman said, including the death of Johannes M.’s mother-in-law.

She had been suffering from cancer and mysteriously died the same weekend that Johannes M. and his wife went to visit her in Poland in early 2024, according to media reports.

The suspect reportedly trained as a radiologist and a general practitioner before going on to specialize in palliative care.

According to Die Zeit, he submitted a doctoral thesis in 2013 looking into the motives behind a series of killings in Frankfurt, which opened with the words “Why do people kill?”

In the charges brought against Johannes M., prosecutors said the doctor had “administered an anesthetic and a muscle relaxant to his patients... without their knowledge or consent.”

The relaxant “paralyzed the respiratory muscles, leading to respiratory arrest and death within minutes.”

In five cases, Johannes M. allegedly set fire to the victims’ apartments after administering the injections.

On one occasion, he is accused of murdering two patients on the same day.

On the morning of July 8, 2024, he allegedly killed a 75-year-old man at his home in the Berlin district of Kreuzberg.

“A few hours later” he is said to have struck again, killing a 76-year-old woman in the neighboring Neukoelln district.

Prosecutors say he started a fire in the woman’s apartment, but it went out.

“When he realized this, he allegedly informed a relative of the woman and claimed that he was standing in front of her flat and that nobody was answering the doorbell,” prosecutors said.

In another case, Johannes M. “falsely claimed to have already begun resuscitation efforts” on a 56-year-old victim, who was initially kept alive by rescuers but died three days later in hospital.

Prosecutors said he had “no motive beyond killing” and are seeking a life sentence.

The case recalls that of notorious German nurse Niels Hoegel, who was handed a life sentence in 2019 for murdering 85 patients.

Hoegel, believed to be modern Germany’s most prolific serial killer, murdered hospital patients with lethal injections between 2000 and 2005, before he was eventually caught in the act.

More recently, a 27-year-old nurse was given a life sentence in 2023 for murdering two patients by deliberately administering unprescribed drugs.

In March, another nurse went on trial in Aachen accused of injecting 26 patients with large doses of sedatives or painkillers, resulting in nine deaths.

Last week, German police revealed they are investigating another doctor suspected of killing several mainly elderly patients.

Investigators are “reviewing” deaths linked to the doctor from the town of Pinneberg in northern Germany, just outside Hamburg, police and prosecutors said.


EU climate VP seeks ‘fair competition’ with China on green energy

Updated 55 min 59 sec ago
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EU climate VP seeks ‘fair competition’ with China on green energy

  • Deep frictions exist over economic relations between the 27-nation bloc and Beijing

BEIJING: The European Union is seeking "fair competition" with China and not a race to the bottom in wages and environmental standards, the bloc's vice president for the clean transition told AFP on Monday.
Deep frictions exist over economic relations between the 27-nation bloc and Beijing.
Brussels is worried that a manufacturing glut propelled by massive state subsidies could add to a yawning trade deficit and result in a flood of cheap Chinese goods undercutting European firms.
Speaking during a visit to Beijing ahead of a major EU-China summit in the city this month, Teresa Ribera dismissed China's claims that the bloc was engaging in "protectionism".
"We Europeans don't want to go down a race towards low incomes, lower labour rights or lower environmental standards," said Ribera, who also serves as the bloc's competition chief.
"It is obvious that we could not be in a good position if there could be an ... over-flooding in our markets that could undermine us with prices that do not reflect the real cost," she said.
The EU imposed extra import taxes of up to 35 percent on Chinese electric vehicle imports in October and has investigated Chinese-owned solar panel manufacturers.
Asked whether EU moves against Chinese green energy firms could harm the global transition to renewables, Ribera said: "It is fair to say that, yes, we may benefit in the very short term."
However, she also warned "it could kill the possibility" of long-term investment in the bloc's future.

Ribera's visit comes as Beijing seeks to improve relations with the European Union as a counterweight to superpower rival the United States, whose President Donald Trump has disrupted the global order and pulled Washington out of international climate accords.
"I don't think that we have witnessed many occasions in the past where a big economy, a big country, decides to isolate in such a relevant manner," she told AFP.
"It is a pity.
"The Chinese may think that the United States has given them a great opportunity to be much more relevant in the international arena," Ribera said.
The visit also comes as the bloc and the United States wrangle over a trade deal. Trump threw months of negotiations into disarray on Saturday by announcing he would hammer the bloc with sweeping tariffs if no agreement was reached by August 1.
Ribera vowed on Monday that the EU would "defend the interests of our companies, our society, our business".
Asked if a deal was in sight, she said: "Who knows? We'll do our best."
However, she insisted that EU digital competition rules -- frequently condemned by Trump as "non-tariff barriers" to trade -- were not on the table.
"It's a question of sovereignty," Ribera said.
"We are not going to compromise on the way we understand that we need to defend our citizens and our society, our values and our market."


Father of American man slain by Israeli settlers tells Arab News US officials do not care

Updated 14 July 2025
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Father of American man slain by Israeli settlers tells Arab News US officials do not care

  • Sayfollah Musallet was beaten to death on his family’s land in the West Bank
  • ‘Where is the outcry from America for an American? We need justice now’

CHICAGO: Kamel Musallet, the father of a 20-year-old American citizen slain by Israeli settlers on Friday, told Arab News that US officials should treat his son’s killing “the same way they’d treat the murder of any American in any country.”

Sayfollah Musallet was beaten to death by settlers on land the family owns outside the Palestinian village of Al-Mazra’a Ash-Sharqiya in the occupied West Bank.

The family are American citizens of Palestinian heritage who have lived in Port Charlotte, Florida, most of their lives.

Sayfollah Musallet, who was born and raised in Florida, went to see family in Al-Mazra’a Ash-Sharqiya when he was confronted by “gangs of settlers” on their nearby land.

Kamel Musallet said he has only received condolences from “someone” at the US Embassy in Jerusalem, but not from any American officials in the US. 

“Where is the concern? My son is an American,” he added, describing him as “a kind person, a good person.”

He said Israeli soldiers prevented family and friends from reaching his son, and medical personnel from treating him.

“He was there, injured, dying, for nearly three hours … The settlers killed him and nothing has been done,” he added.

“Settlers have been going to Palestinian-owned lands randomly attacking any Palestinians they see, trying to steal these lands.

“They’re trying to put tents up on these lands to create new settlements, destroying olive trees and killing farm animals … We’ve asked for protection but have gotten nothing … They’ve been doing this for years.”

He added: “My whole family is American. Who is speaking up in America for our rights, our lives? Where is the outcry from America for an American? We need justice now.”

He said his son had been running an ice cream store that the family opened a year before in Tampa, Florida.

“Sayfollah was such a kind soul, a hard worker. I'm an entrepreneur, so he wanted to be like me … He left a positive impression on everyone he met.”


Trump envoy arrives in Kyiv as US pledges Patriot missiles to Ukraine

Updated 14 July 2025
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Trump envoy arrives in Kyiv as US pledges Patriot missiles to Ukraine

  • Donald Trump last week teased that he would make a ‘major statement’ on Russia on Monday
  • US leader made quickly stopping the Russia-UKraine war one of his diplomatic priorities

KYIV: US President Donald Trump’s special envoy to Ukraine and Russia, retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, arrived in Kyiv on Monday, a senior Ukrainian official said, as anticipation grew over a possible shift in the Trump administration’s policy on the more than three-year war.

Trump last week teased that he would make a “major statement” on Russia on Monday. Trump made quickly stopping the war one of his diplomatic priorities, and he has increasingly expressed frustration about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s unbudging stance on U.S-led peace efforts.

Putin “talks nice and then he bombs everybody,” Trump said late Sunday, as he confirmed the US is sending Ukraine badly needed US-made Patriot air defense missiles to help it fend off Russia’s intensifying aerial attacks.

Russia has spread terror in Ukrainian cities, including the capital, Kyiv, with hundreds of drones and cruise and ballistic missiles that Ukraine’s air defenses are struggling to counter. June brought the highest monthly civilian casualties of the past three years, with 232 people killed and 1,343 wounded, the UN human rights mission in Ukraine said Thursday. Russia launched 10 times more drones and missiles in June than in the same month last year, it said.

That has happened at the same time as Russia’s bigger army is making a new effort to drive back Ukrainian defenders on parts of the 1,000-kilometer frontline.

A top ally of Trump, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, said Sunday that the conflict is nearing an inflection point as Trump shows growing interest in helping Ukraine fight back against Russia’s full-scale invasion. It’s a cause that Trump had previously dismissed as being a waste of US taxpayer money.

“In the coming days, you’ll see weapons flowing at a record level to help Ukraine defend themselves,” Graham said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” He added: “One of the biggest miscalculations (Russian President Vladimir) Putin has made is to play Trump. And you just watch, in the coming days and weeks, there’s going to be a massive effort to get Putin to the table.”

Also, NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte was due in Washington on Monday and Tuesday. He planned to hold talks with Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, as well as members of Congress.

Talks during Kellogg’s visit to Kyiv will cover “defense, strengthening security, weapons, sanctions, protection of our people and enhancing cooperation between Ukraine and the United States,” said the head of Ukraine’s presidential office, Andrii Yermak.

“Russia does not want a cease fire. Peace through strength is President Donald Trump’s principle, and we support this approach,” Yermak said.

Russian troops conducted a combined aerial strike at Shostka, in the northern Sumy region of Ukraine, using glide bombs and drones early Monday morning, killing two people, the regional prosecutor’s office said. Four others were injured, including a 7-year-old, it said.

Overnight from Sunday to Monday, Russia fired four S-300/400 missiles and 136 Shahed and decoy drones at Ukraine, the air force said. It said that 61 drones were intercepted and 47 more were either jammed or lost from radars mid-flight.

The Russian Defense Ministry, meanwhile, said its air defenses downed 11 Ukrainian drones over Russian regions on the border with Ukraine, as well as over the annexed Crimea and the Black Sea.