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Africa’s top public health body says the continent is set to receive its first batch of mpox vaccines as a donation from South Korea. The Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Thursday the 50,000 doses will be used first for health workers and people living in the hardest-hit areas. No timing was given for the doses’ arrival. (Musambi, 12/1)

A person in the eastern part of Virginia is the first to be diagnosed with monkeypox to die from the disease in the commonwealth, the Virginia Department of Health reported Thursday. VDH is not releasing additional information surrounding the case, citing patient confidentiality, but said the person was an adult resident of the region. ... 8,641 people in Virginia had received both doses of the JYNNEOS vaccine for the disease as of Dec. 1, mostly in Northern Virginia. (Reese, 12/1)

In May, when monkeypox began to spread across Europe and beyond, many public-health specialists were taken by surprise. But for researchers who have tracked and studied the viral disease for years in Central and West Africa, the only shock was seeing how accurate their predictions were. “We had always warned that in favourable circumstances, like what led to this outbreak, the disease could pose a great threat to global health,” says Adesola Yinka-Ogunleye, an epidemiologist at the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) in Abuja, who led the country’s investigation and response to a 2017 monkeypox outbreak. (Adepoju, 11/30)