The World Health Organisation (WHO) recommended that four countries go on a Marburg alert around Angola, the epicentre of an outbreak of the deadly Ebola-like virus that has now claimed 174 lives, a top health official said on Thursday.
”Everybody should be on alert. Not only other provinces in Angola but all its neighbouring countries, the Congo, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Namibia and Zambia,” said Anarfi Asamoa-Baah, the Geneva-based United Nations health organisation’s assistant director general of communicable diseases.
The death toll from the virus has jumped from 159 to 174 and has more than doubled in the past three weeks, now spreading to seven of the poor Southern African country’s 18 provinces.
A combined statement from the Angolan government and the WHO said the killer fever has spread to the northern Zaire and central Kwanza Sul provinces.
On Wednesday, the official toll stood at 159 deaths and 181 suspected cases.
The statement said on Thursday that five people died in the Zaire province, but they did not say when, while six people died between March 20 and April 2 in Kwanza Sul in the districts of Quilenda and Amboim, about 300km south of the seaboard capital, Luanda.
”Their deaths happened one or two days after the symptoms of the disease first appeared,” said the statement.
The epicentre of the outbreak is believed to be at a hospital in the town of Uige, about 300km north of Luanda, where 154 people have died.
Six deaths have now also been reported in the capital, but only two were confirmed cases of Marburg. The other four are still under investigation.
Five deaths have been reported in the Malange province, next to Uige, while one death has been reported in the province of Kwanza Norte and another in the oil-rich enclave of Cabinda, the statement said.
A severe haemorrhagic fever akin to Ebola, the Marburg virus spreads on contact with body fluids such as blood, urine, excrement, vomit and saliva.
The disease was first identified in 1967 in Germany after laboratory workers were infected by monkeys from Uganda.
The Marburg outbreak has claimed a record number of lives in Angola, overtaking an earlier peak in the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo. — Sapa-AFP