Marburg fears in Italy

2005-04-01 14:06

Geneva - Italian hospital staff have put nine patients in isolation after they had been suspected of having contact with the Marburg virus, an Ebola-like killer which has broken out in Angola, the United Nations health organisation said on Friday.

World Health Organisation (WHO) spokesperson Fadela Chaib said two other suspected cases had been reported in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), across the border from the north Angola area where the outbreak began and has claimed 127 lives out of 132 cases.

"Nine people who were in contact with an ill person were isolated in an Italian hospital," Chaib said, without giving details of in which town or what nationality the suspected fever patients were.

Last week, an Italian paediatrician died of haemorrhagic fever in Angola, according to Medici con Africa, the relief organisation for which she worked. The WHO was unable to say whether the nine patients in Italy had been in touch with this woman.

The death toll of 127 out of the 132 people who contracted Marburg in an outbreak that started six months ago in the north of Angola came from data given by the WHO on Friday.

Angola on Thursday officially put the toll from the virus at 126, the world's highest, as Canada sent a mobile laboratory to help investigate suspected cases.

A severe form of haemorrhagic fever akin to Ebola, the Marburg virus was first identified in 1967. It spreads on contact with the fluids the body produces in reaction to it, such as blood, urine, excrement, vomit and saliva.

The Marburg virus causes a nameless disease with symptoms like those of Ebola. The epicentre of the outbreak is Angola's northern Uige province.

- AFP