MADRID, Spain (AFP)— Spain will donate 500,000 mpox vaccine doses to countries in central Africa suffering from a surge in cases, the government said Tuesday.

The doses amount to 20 per cent of Spain’s total mpox vaccine reserves, the health ministry said in a statement without specifying which nations in the region will receive the vaccines or when they will arrive.

Spain also urged its European Union peers to follow suit and also donate 20 per cent of their mbox vaccine stockpile, saying it” makes no sense to stockpile vaccines where there is no problem,” the statement added.

France and Germany have both announced they will each donate 100,000 mpox vaccine doses to countries suffering from the emergency.

Formerly known as monkeypox, mpox is an infectious disease caused by a virus transmitted to humans by infected animals that can also be passed from human to human through close physical contact.

It causes fever, muscle pains and skin lesions and in an increasing number of cases, death.

The disease’s resurgence and the detection in the Democratic Republic of Congo of a new strain, dubbed Clade 1b, prompted the World Health Organisation to declare its highest international alert level on August 14.

Outbreaks have been reported in Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda since July.

No mpox cases have yet been reported in Spain. Sweden’s Public Health Agency announced earlier this month it had registered a case of the Clade 1b variant of mpox.

While that was the first case in Europe, the patient had been infected during a visit to an affected African country.