The death toll in an outbreak of the deadly Ebola-like Marburg virus in Angola has risen to 113, with 111 deaths in a northern province and two in the capital, Luanda, health officials said on Friday.
Three-quarters of the deaths were children under the age of five, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO).
”The death toll is 111 … in the Uige provincial hospital,” Carlos Alberto, a health ministry spokesperson, said from Uige, about 300km north of Luanda.
The provincial health director for Luanda, Vita Mvemba, said there were two deaths in the capital.
”We have registered one death at the Josina Machel hospital of a 15-year-old boy who had been to the Uige province … and a case of an Italian doctor, who had also been to Uige, who died on Thursday night in the Sagrada Esperanca clinic,” Mvemba said.
The Italian NGO Medici con Africa Cuamm from Rome has identified the doctor as paediatrician Maria Bonino, who worked for the United Nations and had been a volunteer in Africa for the past 11 years.
She had been practising for the past two years in the Uige provincial hospital, the organisation said.
Alberto said on Friday that a Vietnamese doctor was among those ill with the disease.
”He is not dead,” Albert said, without giving a precise number of sick in the country.
”The situation is stable. We are continuing to look for active signs in the community, hoping to detect more cases of infected people,” he said.
Mvemba added that five cases of Marburg have been detected in Luanda, including the two dead.
The Marburg disease, a severe form of haemorrhagic fever in the same family as Ebola, was first identified in 1967, affecting laboratory workers in the central German town as well as in Frankfurt and Belgrade who had come into contact with infected monkeys from Uganda.
The largest outbreak on record of the Marburg virus occurred from late 1998 to 2000 in the Democratic Republic of Congo, killing 123 people.
Angolan health officials assisted by WHO experts and teams from Médécins sans Frontières and the United States Centers for Disease Control are in Uige to try to shore up measures to stamp out the outbreak. — Sapa-AFP