UNESCO grants 25,000 dollars to Marburg victims in Angola

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has granted 25,000 US dollars to help the victims of Marburg fever, which already killed 210 people in Angola.

According to Angolan news agency Angop on Wednesday, UNESCO General Director Koichiro Matsuura in Paris handed over the money to Angolan Ambassador to UNESCO Almerindo Jaka Jamba, during a special audience in which Jaka Jamba presented his credential letter in his capacity as ambassador to that UN organ.

At the meeting, Jaka Jamba also discussed with Koichiro Matsuura issues related to the cooperation accord signed by the two sides, in the ambit of the visit the Japanese official paid to Angola in January 2004.

The Marburg virus has killed 210 people in Angola's northern Uige province despite the efforts of health workers.

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 World Health Organization, 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 the Congo between 1998 and 2000.