Mpox patients lack medicine and food in DRC hospital

Health workers desperate for support; donations from global bodies dwindling

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Democratic Republic of Congo - Dozens of feverish patients lay on thin mattresses on the floor of a makeshift mpox isolation ward in east Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), as overstretched hospital workers grappled with drug shortages and lack of space to accommodate the influx.

Congo is the epicentre of an mpox outbreak that the World Health Organisation declared to be a global public health emergency in August.

Vaccines are set to arrive within days to fight a new strain of the virus which is mutating faster than expected, scientists report.

Congo's President Felix Tshisekedi, meanwhile, has allowed a first disbursement of US$10 million (S$13 million) to fight the outbreak.

But at the hospital complex in the town of Kavumu, where 900 symptomatic patients have been taken in over the past three months, health workers are desperate for support.