Mystery illness plagues Sudan

2004-05-21 13:27

Andrew England

Nairobi - Health authorities in southern Sudan have reported 15 cases, including four deaths, of a mystery illness similar to the deadly Ebola haemorrhagic fever, the World Health Organisation said on Friday.

WHO has sent a team of experts to Yambio, a Sudanese town near the border with northern Uganda, to investigate and monitor the outbreak.

Laboratory tests by the Kenya Medical Research Institute and the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention have confirmed an Ebola-like infection in 10 of the 15 cases, WHO said in a statement.

Dr Abdullahi Ahmed, head of WHO's southern Sudan office, told reporters that the preliminary tests indicate that the illness is in the "family of Ebola". But so far the death rate is lower than has previously been experienced with Ebola outbreaks, he added.

Vomiting blood

The symptoms of the illness around Yambio include general malaise, fever, vomiting blood and bloody diarrhoea, Ahmed said.

Further tests are being carried out the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta and the results are expected over the weekend, he said.

The WHO statement said there had been no new cases reported for the last three days. The most recent case began on May 15.

Southern Sudan has been wracked by civil war since 1983; thousands of people are periodically displaced by fighting, and public health facilities are rare.

Last May, health experts identified a disease that killed 22 people in southern Sudan as yellow fever.

In 2000, an Ebola outbreak killed 173 people in Gulu district in northern Uganda.

The Ebola virus is spread by contact with body fluids, including sweat and saliva. Outbreaks of the disease are rare, and no one knows where the virus lives when it is not infecting humans. The disease usually kills its victims so fast that it also destroys the host for the virus.

Ugandan health officials said they had circulated warnings in areas that border Sudan and had put health workers on high alert.

- AP