A Red Cross worker spraying chlorine-based disinfectant in Goma in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in August 2024MOISE KASEREKA/EPA-EFE/ShutterstockMpox surged in parts of East, West and Central Africa in 2024, prompting the World Health Organization (WHO) to declare it a public health emergency of international concern in August. This was just over a year after it said an earlier mpox emergency was over, marking the first time the WHO has declared two such alerts consecutively over the same infection.The emergency that ended in 2023 was driven by the clade IIb variant of mpox, formerly known as