The latest assessment of the authorities published last May had reported 4,753 cases identified.
Of the 5.009 cases now identified, 2,795 were so in the Sierra-Léonaise Freetown capital alone.
The government of this West African country indicates that it has intensified its surveillance campaigns with communities.
“Our health teams are hard at work to inspect the families and homes of the various communities looking for suspect cases,” FODAY SAHR, executive director of the National Public Health Agency of Sierra Leone, told AFP.
He said that the number of screening centers was now nine in the country, mainly in Freetown and several large cities in the region. Intensified follow -up of cases has also been set up in the districts.
The Government of Sierra Leone obtained around 206,000 doses of virus vaccine from partners.
Read also: MPOX: The African Union health agency approves an African first PCR test manufactured by the Moroccan company Moldiag
MPOX, caused by a virus of the same family as that of the smallpox, manifests itself mainly by a high fever and the appearance of skin lesions, called vesicles.
Identified for the first time in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in 1970, the disease has long remained limited to ten African countries.
It started in 2022 to expand in the rest of the world, especially in developed countries where the virus had never circulated.
The WHO sparked its highest alert level in 2024 for this epidemic.
The Sierra Leone, a country of eight million inhabitants, was one of the countries most affected by the Ebola epidemic which mainly raged in West Africa ten years ago. The virus killed around 4,000 people there, including almost 7% of health personnel, between 2014 and 2016.
Par LE360 Africa (with AFP)
07/31/2025 at 12:31
