Angola battling Marburg fever

2005-03-29 18:32

Luanda - Angola battled on Tuesday to contain a deadly outbreak of the Ebola-like Marburg virus which has claimed a record toll of 126 according to doctors and officials in the field, but the government said the number of dead was lower.

Health officials in the field said 126 had died - three higher than the worst affected case in the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo - but the government said the fatalities numbered 117.

"Between October 2004 and 28 March 2005, a total of 124 cases were recorded of whom 117 died," the World Health Organisation said in a statement, citing the government.

The statement was released at a meeting in Luanda between officials of the WHO, the Atlanta-based Centres for Disease Control and Prevention and the non-governmental health organisations Medecins sans Frontieres (Doctors without Borders).

No government official was available for comment after the statement.

The mood was meanwhile sombre in hospitals in Luanda among doctors and nurses attending to patients who may or may not have the virus killing more than 100 people, mainly in the north of the country but including three in the seaside capital.

"The situation is serious. Really serious. It's a disease about which not much is known. It's worse than the SARS in Asia," said Margarida Correia, the head of the maternity department in a prominent Luanda hospital, referring to the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome virus that hit Asia in 2003.

"We are very worried because we are in direct contact with the ailing. We are tending to them without sufficient protection," she said.

Luanda's provincial health director Vita Mvemba on Monday appealed for international assistance, saying the southern African country, which only recently emerged from a brutal 27-year civil war, had only 1 200 doctors nationwide.

Case in Lisbon

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.

Three-quarters of the deaths in Angola have been children under the age of five, according to the WHO, but the virus has also started to claim adult victims since it erupted in October.

Angola's former colonial ruler Portugal meanwhile announced Tuesday it was donating equipment worth $116 162 including gloves, protective eyewear, boots and masks.

Also in Lisbon, the government health service said a Portuguese national who was hospitalised on his return home from Angola, amid fears of the virus, had in fact died of malaria.

And doctors in the southern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), adjoining Angola, were receiving emergency training in case the outbreak crossed the border, local authorities said Tuesday.

"We are in the process of training doctors in all the border areas, teaching them to recognise the disease, pass on the details of the symptoms of eventual victims and alert the local population," Dr Daniel Mowanda, a health inspector in Bas Congo province, told AFP.

- AFP