ZURICH, Switzerland (AFP) — Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche said Wednesday that it was increasing its capacity to produce diagnostic tests to detect mpox, amid a flare-up of the potentially deadly virus.

“We’ve ramped up our production in order to meet potential demand,” Roche chief Thomas Schinecker told reporters as he presented the company’s third quarter sales results.

Fresh outbreaks of the viral disease — some involving a new variant — have hit a range of countries in Africa in recent months, with more than 1,100 mpox deaths recorded on the continent so far this year, according to the African Union’s health agency.

The disease has also spread further afield, with Germany on Tuesday recording a first infection with the new mpox variant clade 1b, while single cases have also been detected in Sweden and Thailand.

“It seems like there are more cases in Europe,” Schinecker said.

“Maybe they are not all in the media yet, but there are already more mpox cases.”

Mpox, previously known as monkeypox, is a viral disease related to smallpox that causes fever, body aches, swollen lymph nodes and a rash that forms into blisters.

It has two subtypes — clade 1 and clade 2.

The virus, long endemic in central Africa, gained international prominence in May 2022 when clade 2 spread around the world, mostly affecting gay and bisexual men.

The World Health Organization declared a global health emergency in July 2022, but thanks to vaccination and awareness drives that helped stem the spread, that declaration was lifted in May 2023.

Just a year later however, a new two-pronged epidemic broke out mainly in the Democratic Republic of Congo, with the original clade 1 strain and the new clade, 1b.

Roche first developed its PCR test to detect mpox during the 2022 outbreak.

Schinecker, who previously headed Roche’s diagnostics unit, did not disclose Wednesday how many tests the company was currently making.

“But we could manage probably a 10-times higher demand,” he insisted.

Roche told AFP in an email that its production capacities were “designed for fluctuating global demand needs”.

“We are well set up to increase production output and with that produce more tests based on the needs worldwide,” it said, adding that “we have tests in stock”.

Roche, the world’s largest maker of cancer drugs and one of the biggest makers of diagnostic tests, on Wednesday posted better-than-expected sales for the first nine months of the year, up two per cent at nearly 45 billion Swiss francs (US$52 billion).