Marburg outbreak kills 203 in Angola

The Ebola-like Marburg virus has killed 203 people out of the 221 infected cases in Angola by Monday despite the efforts of health workers.

A total of 184 deaths were reported in the northern province of Uige, bringing the mortality rate nationwide to 92 percent, according to a statement released by the health authorities.

In addition, six cases were found in Kwanza Sul, five in Zaire,four in Luanda, two in Mananje, one in Kwanza Norte and one in Cabinda.

Most of the dead were children under five, according to health workers.

Spreading through contact with bodily fluids such as blood, excrement, vomit, saliva, sweat and tears, Marburg can kill people rapidly as there is neither vaccine nor drugs against it. The epidemic can only be contained with relatively simple health precautions, and isolation of the infected is the only way to stymie the spread.

Efforts of health workers to fight the epidemic, however, have been hampered by local traditions that relatives of the dead shall spend a long-time with the presence of the body, which increases the risk of spreading.

To make the situation worse, some people refused to say their relatives were died of the diseases or hid the patients at home.

Health workers said local residents lack sufficient information to understand the anti-spreading measures, and the basic hygiene rules were still not fully observed in some hospitals.

Fatomata Diallo of the World Health Organization (WHO) said there was a hostility from the local community because "we are interfering in how they live."

She said as the health workers in full protective gear, "like an astronaut," came into a family to take away a sick person or a suspected one or a dead body, it was not easy for the community to accept it.

Also on Monday, the WHO sent three communications experts to Uige, trying to give clear messages to Angolans on the epidemic.

The WHO and the Angolan Health Ministry were considering shutting down the isolation ward of a hospital in Uige, and the decision will be made within 48 to 72 hours, said Filomena Wilson, an official of the ministry.

He also said the decision shall take into account the needs of other patients with other illness at the hospital.

WHO deputy director-general Anarfi Asamoa-Baah has issued an alert in Luanda for neighboring countries to take emergency precautions against the spread of the epidemic that first broke out in Uige in October 2004.

The United Nations also launched an international appeal for 3.5 million US dollars to help contain the Marburg spreading.

So far, the WHO, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and an international humanitarian group, Doctors Without Borders, have deployed teams in Uige to combat the virus.

Marburg gets its name from a German town where it was first reported in the 1960s after researchers there had contracted the disease from monkeys imported from Africa. In the last known outbreak of Marburg, 123 people were killed in the Democratic Republic of Congo between 1998 and 2000.