The World Health Or­ga­ni­za­tion said Fri­day it has grant­ed its first au­tho­riza­tion for use of a vac­cine against mpox in adults, call­ing it an im­por­tant step to­ward fight­ing the dis­ease in Africa.

The ap­proval of the vac­cine by Bavar­i­an Nordic A/S means that donors like vac­cines al­liance Gavi and UNICEF can buy it. But sup­plies are lim­it­ed be­cause there’s on­ly a sin­gle man­u­fac­tur­er.

“This first (au­tho­riza­tion) of a vac­cine against mpox is an im­por­tant step in our fight against the dis­ease, both in the con­text of the cur­rent out­breaks in Africa, and in fu­ture,” said WHO Di­rec­tor-Gen­er­al Tedros Ad­hanom Ghe­breye­sus.

The U.N. health agency chief called for “ur­gent” scale-up of pro­cure­ment, do­na­tions and roll­out to get the vac­cine where it is need­ed most, along with oth­er re­sponse mea­sures.

Un­der the WHO au­tho­riza­tion, the vac­cine can be ad­min­is­tered in peo­ple aged 18 or above in a two-dose reg­i­men. The ap­proval says that while the vac­cine is not cur­rent­ly li­censed for those un­der 18 years old, it may be used in in­fants, chil­dren and ado­les­cents “in out­break set­tings where the ben­e­fits of vac­ci­na­tion out­weigh the po­ten­tial risks.”

The mpox vac­cine made by Bavar­i­an Nordic was pre­vi­ous­ly au­tho­rized by nu­mer­ous rich coun­tries across Eu­rope and North Amer­i­ca dur­ing the glob­al mpox out­break in 2022. Mil­lions of dos­es giv­en to adults showed the vac­cine helped slow the virus’ spread, but there is lim­it­ed ev­i­dence of how it works in chil­dren.

Of­fi­cials at the Africa Cen­ter for Dis­ease Con­trol and Pre­ven­tion said last month that near­ly 70% of cas­es in Con­go — the coun­try hard­est hit by mpox — are in chil­dren younger than 15, who al­so ac­count­ed for 85% of deaths.

Over­all, WHO said over 120 coun­tries have con­firmed more than 103,000 cas­es of mpox since the out­break be­gan two years ago. Its lat­est tal­ly, as of Sun­day, showed that 723 peo­ple in more than a dozen coun­tries in Africa have died of the dis­ease.

African ex­perts have es­ti­mat­ed they might need about 10 mil­lion vac­cines to stop the on­go­ing out­breaks on the con­ti­nent. As of last week, Con­go, the most-af­fect­ed coun­try, had re­ceived on­ly about 250,000 dos­es.

On Thurs­day, the Africa CDC said 107 new deaths and 3,160 new cas­es had been record­ed in the past week, just a week af­ter it and WHO launched a con­ti­nen­tal re­sponse plan.

Mpox be­longs to the same fam­i­ly of virus­es as small­pox but caus­es milder symp­toms like fever, chills and body aches. Peo­ple with more se­ri­ous cas­es can de­vel­op le­sions on the face, hands, chest and gen­i­tals.

GENE­VA (AP) —