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Mpox remains health emergency, WHO insists

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The World Health Organisation (WHO) has insisted that the Mpox epidemic remains a public health emergency.

WHO first declared an emergency when a new strain of mpox spread from the severely affected Democratic Republic of the Congo to neighbouring countries in August.

The WHO Director-General has decided that the increase in mpox still qualifies as a public health emergency of worldwide significance after the WHO called a meeting of its Emergency Committee and followed its recommendations.

According to WHO, the decision was made in light of the growing number and ongoing geographic dispersion of cases, field operating difficulties, and the requirement to establish and maintain a coordinated response across nations and partners.

Mpox is a virus that is spread by close contact and usually manifests as pus-filled lesions and flu-like symptoms. Although it is typically minor, it can be fatal.

More than 1,000 suspected deaths and more than 46,000 suspected cases have been reported this year throughout Africa, primarily in Congo.

The WHO’s highest level of warning, known as a “public health emergency of international concern,” was previously used to describe a worldwide epidemic of a different type of mpox in 2022–2023.

This year’s notice was issued in response to the transmission of a novel viral variation known as clade Ib. Among other nations, cases of this variation have been verified in the UK, Germany, Sweden, and India.

Following criticism for moving too slowly on vaccinations, WHO approved Bavarian Nordic’s mpox vaccine in September and listed Japan’s KM Biologics vaccine for emergency use earlier this month.

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Musings From Abroad

French army begins Chad pullout

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Just two weeks after local authorities said they were terminating their defence collaboration, the French army announced that jets deployed in the capital N’Djamena had returned home on Tuesday, marking the beginning of France’s military departure from Chad.

The government of Chad, a crucial Western partner in the war against Islamic jihadists in the area, unexpectedly terminated its defence cooperation treaty with France on November 28, a decision that caught French authorities off guard.

It is still unclear how the evacuation will be executed and if any French forces will remain in the central African country at all, even after the first Mirage aircraft returned to their base in eastern France on Tuesday.

“It marks the beginning of the return of French equipment stationed in N’Djamena,” Army spokesperson Colonel Guillaume Vernet said.

Due to anti-French sentiment and military takeovers in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, France has already withdrawn its troops from those West African nations.

Decades of French military participation in the Sahel area came to an end with the departure from Chad, and more recently, French military operations against Islamist extremists in the region were discontinued.

There are still around 1,000 French soldiers in Chad. Vernet stated that it would still take several weeks for the two nations to establish a schedule for reducing its activities.

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Musings From Abroad

Court documents show Meta contractor overlooked Ethiopia rebel threats to moderators

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New evidence cited by Reuters suggests that a contractor employed by Facebook’s parent company, Meta, overlooked threats against content moderators by Ethiopian rebels during a case contesting the removal of dozens of moderators in Kenya.

Last year, 185 content moderators sued Meta and two contractors for losing their positions with Sama, a Kenyan business that moderated Facebook material, for seeking to form a union.

After Facebook switched contractors, they were barred from applying for the same jobs at Majorel.

Foxglove, a British non-profit helping Ethiopian moderators, submitted court filings on Dec. 4 alleging that Sama ignored their accusations that OLA rebels had targeted them for deleting their videos.

In the petition obtained by Reuters, the moderators said Sama accused them “of creating a false account and manufacturing” the threatening messages before agreeing to a probe and transferring one of the rebels’ officially named moderators to a safe house.

In his statement, Moderator Abdikadir Alio Guyo said that OLA had threatened “content moderators who were constantly pulling down their graphic Facebook Posts.”

“They told us to stop removing their content from Facebook or else we would face dire consequences,” he said, adding that his supervisor dismissed his concerns.
In his declaration, another moderator, Hamza Diba Tubi, stated that OLA sent him a message with the names and addresses of both himself and his coworkers.

“Since I received that threatening message, I have lived in so much fear of even visiting my family members in Ethiopia,” he said.

After peace negotiations in Tanzania in 2023 failed to end a decades-old conflict, the government of Oromiya, Ethiopia’s biggest province, accused OLA rebels of killing “many civilians” in assaults.

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