Freetown, Sierra Leone (AFP)-Sierra Leone has seen a new surge in mpox infections, recording 1,140 cases and nine deaths since the start of the year, the health ministry said.

The West African country, which in January declared a public health emergency to combat mpox, last week said the death toll stood at six, with 763 cases.

The capital Freetown has the highest number of detected cases, according to the latest figures sent to AFP late Thursday.

The country began vaccinating children from the age of 12, high-risk people and exposed healthcare workers in early April after receiving 61,300 doses from the World Health Organization.

“We are ramping up the vaccination drive in Freetown, border towns and rural areas mainly for frontline health workers and high-risk hotspots to ensure the protection of our people from the virus,” Desmond Maada Kangbai, who leads the health ministry’s vaccination programme, told AFP.

So far, 2,500 people have been vaccinated, he added.

The government has opened four treatment centres in the capital since February.

Mpox is caused by a virus from the same family as smallpox, manifesting in a high fever and skin lesions.

First identified in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1970, the disease had generally been confined to a dozen African countries.

But in 2022, it began to spread more widely, reaching developed countries where the virus had never previously circulated.

The WHO declared its highest level of alert in 2024.

A decade ago, Sierra Leone was one of the countries worst affected by an Ebola epidemic, which between 2014 and 2016 killed about 4,000 people, including nearly seven percent of health workers.