Mpox in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, 2010-2024: Multidisciplinary Investigations

In 2021, before the global outbreak of mpox which drew considerable attention to the disease, our team put in place a series of projects to investigate outbreaks of mpox in the DRC. We referred to these the Mpox Biology Outcomes Transmission and Epidemiology (MBOTE) projects (www.mbote-mpox.com). My PhD proposal includes selected topics from the MBOTE projects implemented in the DRC and Belgium with the following aims intended as separate publications and chapters in the future doctoral thesis: Chapter I will analyze mpox epidemiological trends from national epidemiological and laboratory surveillance data in the DRC between 2010 and 2023 (The MBOTE EPITREND Project); Chapter II will involve multidisciplinary investigations of an outbreak of mpox in a remote predominantly savannah health zone in the Maniema province (DRC) that began since October 2021, providing insights from epidemiological, spatial and genomic findings (MBOTE Maniema Project); Chapter III will describe the field implementation and investigate the performance of the GeneXpert for mpox diagnosis in the DRC during the 2024 outbreak and finally Chapter IV will characterize cytokine, chemokine and growth factors blood profile associated with Clade IIb monkeypox virus infected patients in Belgium, to compare with Clade I findings from the DRC.