now the Philippines just reported its first case of moox since December now this is all after the World Health Organization last week declared empo a global Public Health Emergency that's its highest form of alert Angelica peoples is here at the latest on that particular move in World Health uh this is nowhere near what the response was like during the covid early days of covid but it's still very important what exactly is the context around this particular move by The Who yeah so right now Africa Remains the epicenter of this empo outbreak more than 17,000 cases have been reported there and 500 deaths since the start of this year mainly in the Democratic Republic of the Congo a new clay think of it as a variant is driving this Surge and a lot of the cases are in children which Su suggests that it's spreading more easily through casual contact this strain potentially is more contagious through casual contact so it's not Airborne it's spreading through contact but the question is is it spreading more easily through contact a lot of the cases probably with children in the DRC our household contact also spread within institutions inside hospitals and healthc Care Facilities that have overcrowded but you're worry about what would happen if it got into an Institutional setting would it spread more easily the good news is that we already have vaccines but the challenge of course is making them and getting them to where they need to go and the biggest empo vaccine maker Bavarian Nordic saying that it can manufact factur 2 million doses by the end of this year and 10 million by the end of 2025 the CEO telling me that they're already looking to increase the capacity even more now this is uh one of those situations where capacity is always going to be an issue is there a projection that this Rises to the point where you would need to see a massive ramp up in production the likes of which we saw in the efforts to produce Mass produce the covid vaccine at this point it doesn't seem seem like that's going to be the case so far again everything we're seeing is really concentrated in Africa even these cases um there was one in Sweden last week that was someone who was in Africa and with the case in the Philippines that you mentioned at the top here that still hasn't actually been um verified that it's part of this latest outbreak so at this point it still seems like it's a concentrated problem but you know we'll keep an eye and see if it rises to that level of a mass production effort all right Angelica peoples with the latest on impal thank you very much for that