Angola grappled on Tuesday to contain a deadly outbreak of the Ebola-like Marburg virus, which has claimed a record toll of 126 according to doctors and officials in the field, but the government said the number of dead is lower.
Health officials in the field said 126 have died — three higher than the worst-affected case in the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) — but the government said the fatalities number 117.
”Between October 2004 and March 28 2005, a total of 124 cases were recorded, of whom 117 died,” the World Health Organisation (WHO) said in a statement, citing the government.
The statement was released at a meeting in Luanda between officials of the WHO, the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the non-governmental health organisation Médécins sans Frontières.
No government official was available for comment after the statement.
Meanwhile, the mood was sombre in hospitals in Luanda among doctors and nurses attending to patients who may or may not have the virus that has killed more than 100 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 [severe acute respiratory syndrome] in Asia,” said Margarida Correia, the head of the maternity department in a prominent Luanda hospital, referring to the 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, has only 1 200 doctors nationwide.
A severe form of haemorrhagic fever akin to Ebola, the Marburg virus was first identified in 1967. 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 WHO, but the virus has also started to claim adult victims since it erupted in October.
Angola’s former colonial ruler, Portugal, meanwhile announced on Tuesday it is donating equipment worth €90 000, including gloves, protective eyewear, boots and masks.
Also in Lisbon, the government health service said a Portuguese national who was hospitalised on his return home from Angola, amid fears of the virus, had in fact died of malaria.
Angola’s neighbour the DRC has gone on high alert in case the virus crosses the border.
”The DRC is in a general state of alert,” Health Minister Emile Bongeli told a press conference in Kinshasa.
Doctors in the southern DRC, adjoining Angola, are receiving emergency training in case the outbreak crosses the border.
”We are in the process of training doctors in all the border areas, teaching them to recognise the disease, pass on the details of the symptoms of eventual victims and alert the local population,” said Dr Daniel Mowanda, a health inspector in Bas Congo province.
Mowanda said the protective kits issued by the WHO are being distributed in provincial hospitals but underlined that so far no cases have been detected in the DRC, where the previous worst outbreak occurred between 1998 and 2000. There are no plans at the moment to close the border.
Congo also stepped up health controls along its border with the DRC in order to reduce the possibility of the outbreak spreading, the health ministry said.
The disease has also provoked a certain degree of hostility in Angola 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 is not scared.
”These could be mere rumours. I have my Christ,” she said simply.
Angolan health ministry spokesperson Carlos Alberto said many victims died because they consulted kimbandeiros, or traditional healers, and only went to the hospital when it was too late to do anything. — Sapa-AFP