Panic and ignorance abounded on Tuesday in Angola as the war-ravaged country’s skeletal medical staff grappled with the worst ever outbreak of the Ebola-like Marburg virus, which has claimed a record toll.
The mood was a sombre one in hospitals in Luanda among doctors and nurses attending to patients who may or may not have the disease that has so far killed 126 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.
Conceicao Antonio, a 36-year-old health worker who registers and weighs the sick and also issues death certificates, said she had not been given any kind of equipment, masks or gloves to protect herself from the virus.
”Nobody wants to contract the disease,” she said.
A severe form of haemorrhagic fever akin to Ebola, the Marburg virus was first identified in 1967 in a laboratory in the German town of the same name. 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 World Health Organisation, but the virus has also started to claim adult victims including at least seven medical workers since it erupted in October.
Quiala Godi, the head of health services in the northern Uige province –the epicentre of the outbreak — said there was chaos in the provincial capital, also called Uige.
”The [sole] hospital is almost closed. The employees don’t want to come to work. Everybody has fled.” Luanda midwife-cum-nurse Maria Nsimba said the maternity home she worked in was on full alert.
”Many of those who died in Uige were nurses like us,” she said.
The disease has also provoked a certain degree of hostility towards the Congolese.
”I heard that it’s a disease the ‘langas’ [Congolese] brought to Uige to kill Angolans,” said 42-year-old street vendor Eva Domingos Jinga. ”I was told not to buy food sold by the langas if one wants to avoid the disease.” But Nzilambote Lumbu, a Congolese street seller, said she was not scared.
”These could be mere rumours. I have my Christ,” she said simply.
Luandan Bela Paquete, however, predicted doom, saying she did not know what preventive measures to take.
”We are scared of this sickness,” she said. ”It’s going to kill a lot of people.” Even educated people often know little about the Marburg virus, like 17-year-old economics student Natalia Ferreira, who said it was ”yellow fever”.
Health ministry spokesperson Carlos Alberto said many victims died because they consulted ”kimbandeiros”, or traditional healers, and only came to the hospital when it was too late to do anything.
”For example, the last nurse to die in Uige was first taken to a ‘kimbandeiro’ and only when her condition worsened was she brought to hospital,” he said.
Previously, the most serious recorded outbreak of Marburg was in the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo between 1998 and 2000, when 123 people died. — Sapa-AFP