Marburg 'still to peak' - WHO

2005-04-07 18:50

Jan Hennop

Viana - A top World Health Organisation official chose Angola to celebrate World Health Day on Thursday, saying that the death toll has "not yet peaked" from the killer Marburg virus in the poor southern African country devastated by 27 of civil war.

"We are still seeing new cases," said Anarfi Asamoa-Baah, the Geneva-based UN health organisation's assistant director general of communicable diseases, who arrived in the country's capital Luanda on Tuesday.

"It's going to get worse before it gets better," he told AFP, ahead of a visit to a clinic in the dusty Angolan township of Viana, about 20km southeast of the seaboard capital which has been gripped by fear of the haemorrhagic fever.

The official death toll from the Ebola-like virus, which spread through contact with bodily fluids (blood, urine, excrement, vomit, saliva) and for which there is no specific treatment stood at 159 on Thursday morning.

Asamoa-Baah said the WHO - which celebrated World Health Day under the banner of "Make every mother and child count" - was happy "for the moment" with the measures put in place to combat the epidemic.

"There is still a lot of room for improvement. Systems have been put into place but we need more people and more equipment," he said, commending the setting up of to laboratories in Luanda and in Uige, the epicentre of the deadly outbreak some 300km north of the capital.

Monkeys

A rare and little-known virus, Marburg first broke out in Angola in October last year and initially baffled scientists until last month when it was identified after samples were sent to the Centres for Disease Control (CDC) in the United States.

Marburg was discovered in 1967, when laboratory workers in the German town with the same name, were infected by monkeys from Uganda.

Asamoa-Baah said one of the weaknesses remained the lack of information to Angola's 14 million inhabitants, despite a radio and television campaign on the country's two channels.

"The greatest weakness we have is that we still don't have enough information out to educate the public - what this disease is, how it is spread and how people can get it through contact with the dead," he told AFP.

The state-run Journal de Angola ran a front-page article Thursday, saying more measures are being taken to combat the disease.

- AFP