This doctor raised the alarm about a deadly mpox outbreak that went global

Placide Mbala is part of Nature’s 10, a list of people who shaped science in 2024

Early this year, cases of mpox erupted across Central Africa, killing hundreds. Seeing the events unfold so soon after the still-simmering outbreak of 2022 “felt like scientific amnesia”, says Placide Mbala, an epidemiologist at the National Institute of Biomedical Research in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

Mbala led a team of researchers who sounded the alarm about the latest outbreak when they spotted a suspicious cluster of mpox cases among young adults and sex workers in an eastern region of the DRC. The team predicted that the disease would move quickly and urged health officials both in the DRC and in neighbouring countries to devise plans to contain the monkeypox virus’s spread.

He and his colleagues analysed the genome of the virus (E. H. Vakaniaki et al. Nature Med. 30, 2791–2795; 2024), revealing that it was a new strain, capable of passing from human to human and distinct from the virus that caused the 2022 outbreak and other previous outbreaks in the DRC. It has since been detected in Sweden, Thailand, India, Germany, the United States, the United Kingdom and six African countries that had never before reported mpox infections.

Mbala has been instrumental in leading these research projects, says Jason Kindrachuk, a virologist at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada, who collaborates with Mbala. Furthermore, Mbala has “been coordinating response and community-engagement activities across the country, and doing all this in the least selfish, most diplomatic and democratic ways”, Kindrachuk adds.

It’s a role that Mbala has long trained for. After finishing medical school in 2006 and spending a year as a clinician in Kinshasa, he met Jean-Jacques Muyembe-Tamfum, a microbiologist who directs the centre where Mbala works. Mbala was impressed by Muyembe-Tamfum’s work — in particular his dogged efforts to find the animal reservoir of Ebola, having co-discovered the Ebola virus in 1976. Muyembe-Tamfum took Mbala under his wing, and in 2008 they worked to improve the country’s capacity for mpox testing and treatment. Later, Mbala helped to diagnose and confirm, through genetic sequencing, the first infections with the Ebola virus during the DRC’s 2014 outbreak.

“He’s leaving quite the legacy, and he’s really fitting the shoes of his mentor,” says Nicaise Ndembi, a virologist at the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention in Addis Ababa, who is coordinating the agency’s 2024 mpox response.

For Mbala, it is his personal mission to put an end to the scientific amnesia that allowed conditions such as mpox to linger and re-emerge. He says that the world knew what the monkeypox virus was capable of, and yet, once infections outside Africa dropped below a certain level, the disease became neglected once again. Vaccines and therapeutics that many high-income countries deployed to control the 2022 outbreaks remained out of reach of African nations until last September — when the strain had already spread aggressively throughout the continent.

Mbala aims to better understand how the disease spreads in the DRC and neighbouring countries. His team has found that the virus can spread rampantly in displacement camps and through non-sexual contact; previously, mpox in Central Africa caused small, localized outbreaks and was known to spread to people only through contact with infected animals (D. Mukadi-Bamuleka et al. Preprint at medRxiv https://doi.org/g8dxrz; 2024).