Deadly virus death toll rises

2005-03-27 09:33

Luanda - Angola on Saturday anxiously awaited the arrival of foreign medical experts sent to check the spread of a killer virus, as the death toll from an outbreak of the Ebola-like Marburg disease rose to 120 and the epidemic spread to a new region.

"The situation is critical," said deputy health minister Jose Van-Dumen, returning from a two-day field visit to the province of Uige in northern Angola, which has been worst hit by the highly contagious disease.

"This is extremely serious, strong preventative measures are needed to contain this outbreak of Marburg disease," he said late on Friday.

A health ministry official said a pregnant woman died of the Marburg virus in a hospital in the northern province of Cabinda on Saturday, the first fatality outside the capital Luanda and the province of Uige, bringing the nationwide death toll to 120 in less than six months.

"I can confirm that today (Saturday), a woman died in the hospital in Cabinda from heamorraghic Marburg fever," Filomeno Forte, the head of the health ministry's epidemiology department, told AFP.

Four people also died from the Marburg virus in the Uige provincial hospital on Saturday.

He warned the final toll could be far higher since official figures only included "the sick who have come to hospital, not those who are dying at home."

The Marburg virus, a severe form of haemorrhagic fever in the same family as Ebola, was first identified in 1967. The disease kills around one in four who contract it and a specific treatment for it is unknown.

The disease

Until now the most serious outbreak of the disease was in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where 123 people died between 1998 and 2000.

The Angolan epidemic broke out in October 2004 but has worsened in the past three weeks, with a total of 117 dead in Uige and two in Luanda.

Three-quarters of the deaths have been children under the age of five, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO), but the virus has also started to claim adult victims including six medical workers.

However, Marie-Claude Georges-Courbot, deputy head of the WHO reference centre for haemorrhagic diseases, said the epidemic should be contained "within a few weeks" now that it has been identified and adequate steps can be taken.

Victims of the Marburg virus, which is spread only on contact and not through the air, can suffer from a severe watery diarrhoea, abdominal pain, nausea and vomiting early on in the illness followed by severe chest and lung pains, sore throat and cough, according to the WHO.

Many cases result in severe bleeding, beginning from the fifth day and affecting the gastrointestinal tract and the lungs, accompanied by a rash, sometimes involving the entire body.

- AFP