Traditional funeral rites in Angola are putting the families of Marburg victims at risk of contracting the killer virus.
For most Angolan families, preparing the body and kissing and embracing the deceased are integral to bidding a final farewell. But the secretions from a body increase after death, making such practices highly dangerous in the case of a Marburg-related death.
”We’re just telling them: call in the specialised groups from the nearest health unit and let them deal with the corpse because you can get very easily contaminated if you try to touch them,” Celso Malavoloneke of the United Nations Children’s Fund says.
”We’re all parents and it would be very hard for someone to tell you not to touch your own child if he is sick. You know that all these African societies are very much tied to ancestry, and also the way you treat the deceased; for the people here not to be able to pay their last tribute and respect to deceased loved ones — that’s particularly hard.”
On Monday the death toll from the epidemic — the world’s worst to date — stood at 235 of 257 known cases.
In northern Uige province — the epicentre of the Marburg crisis — medical teams are dispatched to people’s homes when alerted to a suspected case or death.
Information is being disseminated via radio and television advertisements, traditional leaders and healers, churches and mobile teams of ”activists”, advising on how to care for the sick.
This includes wearing masks and gloves, or using strong plastic bags without holes if gloves are not available.
Although Uige’s provincial hospital now has a fully equipped and staffed isolation unit, many families are still ”hiding” the sick at home.
Medical workers say there is widespread mistrust of the isolation unit, in part because the Marburg mortality rate of more than 90% means the sick do not return home once they are admitted.
World Health Organisation epidemiologist Francois Libama says: ”If we succeed in managing all the cases and the funerals, we’ll start reducing the risk of transmission. In the case of an epidemic it’s impossible to say how many days or months lie ahead.”