A NYT reporter went to Congo, where the mpox epidemic has reached the teeming capital, infecting children and their mothers, who sell sex to survive.
Mireille Efonge got sick a few months ago, with a fever and painful blisters on her groin. She became too weak to move, so neighbors carried her to a health center with walls of plastic sheeting in Pakadjuma, a crowded, poor community in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
There, a nurse called an ambulance to take her to a hospital. Soon lesions broke out on her head and the rest of her body, each one a hard nub of throbbing pain.
Finally she was given a diagnosis: mpox. “I’d never heard of it,” Ms. Efonge said.
This was back in August, when the mpox virus — closely related to smallpox — was still almost unknown in Kinshasa, a city of 17 million people.