Angolans urged to report cases of suspected Marburg virus

The governor of the Marburg fever-devastated Angolan northern Uige province has appealed to the local residents to cooperate with the team of international physicians, by reporting suspected cases of the hemorrhage fever.

The governor, Antonio Bento Cangulo, made the call at a meeting on Monday in the city of Uige, at which he stressed that the lack of collaboration with the citizens in reporting suspected cases has resulted in the proliferation of this disease.

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, the Angolan Health Ministry said.

Like Ebola, which also has hit Africa, Marburg is a hemorrhagic fever. It spreads through contact with bodily fluids and can kill rapidly. There is no vaccine.

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.