The death toll from the outbreak of the Ebola-like Marburg virus in Angola has reached 280, most of whom succumbed to the disease in the northern Uige province, the health ministry and the World Health Organisation said late on Monday. The Ebola-like Marburg virus can kill a healthy person in a week.
The world’s worst outbreak of the Ebola-like Marburg virus has so far claimed 253 lives in Angola, a joint statement by the Southern African nation’s health ministry and the World Health Organisation said on Thursday. ”The epidemic is under control … It is waning,” Deputy Health Minister Jose van Dunem said recently.
The death toll from an outbreak of the Marburg virus in Angola has climbed to 244, authorities said. The health ministry and World Health Organisation said in a joint statement on Thursday that the number of fatalities rose by five over the previous 24 hours. Authorities said they recorded no new cases from Wednesday to Thursday.
Angolan health officials said on Wednesday that the death toll from the Ebola-like Marburg virus is climbing still, reaching 239, but at a slower rate as more citizens are joining in a mass effort to stamp out the disease. A total of 518 people are under observation, of whom 406 are in Uige, after coming in contact with the virus.
Fearful of the Marburg virus that has killed 210 people, inhabitants of the northern Angolan city of Uige have given up their traditional greeting of wrapping friends and acquaintances in a hug. Locals welcomed a reporter on Thursday by touching right legs covered by trousers — a new custom devised to help check the spread of the virus.
Three musicians are recording a song about the killer Marburg virus in Angola — just one example of actions taken by ordinary citizens who want to stamp out the virus now claiming up to 10 lives a day. ”Marburg, leave our people in peace. We are going to kick you out of this country,” goes the song in Portuguese.
Health experts fighting the killer Marburg virus in northern Angola said on Monday they were facing denial from families who are refusing to send their sick to hospitals or are taking them out of the city, worsening the risk of contamination. Isolation of victims is the only way to slow the spread of the disease, for which there are no drugs or vaccine.
Fear stalked the streets on Saturday in the squalid northern Angolan town of Uige, devastated by years of civil war and now the epicentre of an outbreak of the killer Marburg virus, which has claimed 180 lives so far. In Uige province alone, 160 people have been killed by the virus, which has claimed 98% of those infected in the outbreak.
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. The death toll from the virus has more than doubled in the past three weeks.
Angola’s Parliament on Wednesday passed a resolution asking the government of President Eduardo dos Santos for rapid measures to combat the outbreak of the deadly Ebola-like Marburg virus, which has now killed 159 people. It was the first parliamentary move in Angola to fight the untreatable haemorrhagic fever.
Angolan health workers in a slum outside Luanda were treating a new suspected case of the Marburg virus on Tuesday as a senior United Nations official warned that the outbreak of the Ebola-like epidemic is not yet under control. The virus has now also spread to Malenge province, which is on the border with Uige.
The Marburg virus has reached a fourth province in Angola, bringing the nationwide toll from the Ebola-like disease to 130, Angola’s health ministry and the World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Friday. The official death toll from the disease had stood at 126 on Thursday, since the worst global outbreak of the virus started six months ago.
”If peacetime Angola is to lift itself out of the slough of poverty, the government must open its books to scrutiny, and donors, industry and the international community need to take a tough stance to ensure this happens”, says Doug Steinberg, the outgoing country director of the humanitarian NGO, Care. He shares his views on the eve of his departure.
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 but the government said the fatalities number 117.
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 be infected with the killer virus.
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.
A deadly haemorrhagic fever that has claimed the lives of 96 people, mainly children, in Angola’s northern Uige province has been identified as the rare Marburg virus, officials from the ministry of health and the World Health Organisation said late on Tuesday. The illness is from the same family as the deadly Ebola virus.
An outbreak of an unidentified haemorrhagic fever has claimed the lives of 93 people in northern Angola, Deputy Minister of Health Jose van Dunem said late on Monday. Angolan health officials have asked the Centers for Disease Control in the United States to conduct tests to determine whether the fever is caused by the Ebola virus.
An outbreak of an unidentified haemorrhagic fever has claimed the lives of 87 people in northern Angola over the past four months, health ministry spokesperson Carlos Alberto said on Friday. The ministry is awaiting the results of samples sent to Senegal and the United States to identify the strain of the fever.
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/ 18 February 2005
A major police operation in Angola against illegal diamond prospectors was a success, with tens of thousands of mostly Congolese prospectors expelled from the country, officials said. Police estimate they have cleared more than 100 000 illegal prospectors, as well as their families, from the diamond areas.
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/ 9 February 2005
At least 20 people, among them many children, were killed in Angola and scores more injured after a truck ploughed into a crowd of carnival revellers on Tuesday, Angolan media reported. The accident, in the city of Lubango in southern Huila province, happened when the vehicle appeared to lose control of its brakes.
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/ 5 February 2005
Although Angola applied for funding to fight malaria, the money will arrive too late to switch to more effective combination drugs and avoid another grim season of preventable deaths. Stamping out the scourge — one of the biggest killers of Angolan children — is considered a top priority by many in the health ministry, but events have undermined the good intentions of the government.
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/ 17 January 2005
Like much of the hidden richness of Africa, the diamond mine at Catoca in eastern Angola strikes the rare visitor as a surprising oasis of wealth in the middle of a desert of poverty. The open-sky mineworks look like a huge upside-down pyramid where the Catoca Mining Company turns out more than three-million carats of rough diamond a year.
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/ 17 November 2004
Angola is losing -million a day due to a flourishing illicit trade in diamonds, Mining Minister Manuel Africano said on Tuesday, as new sales plans were announced in Belgium. More than 300 000 foreigners have been deported from Angola as part of a crackdown on diamond traffickers, police announced in September.
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/ 5 November 2004
Angola’s national oil company, Sonangol, has refused to renew an oil-production licence to France’s Total oil group for offshore fields located in the north of the country, a company spokesperson said on Friday. Total produces 160 000 barrels per day in Angola.
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/ 27 October 2004
The sleepy town of Cabinda has a forlorn air about it, but few outward signs of the decades-long conflict that has plagued the oil-rich Angolan province. Although Cabinda produces 60% of Angola’s oil revenues, the province, saddled with one of the highest HIV rates in the country, has been slow to respond to the epidemic.
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/ 17 September 2004
Angola’s oil production has for the first time broken the one million barrels a day barrier after a new offshore field came online, officials said on Thursday. An offshore field called Kizomba, operated and majority-owned by Britain’s BP Amoco, is producing 120 000 barrels a day, two senior officials with state oil company Sonangol said on condition of anonymity. Sonangol also owns a stake in the field.
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/ 16 September 2004
The Angolan government is going ahead with its plan to hold elections in 2006, the country’s first ballot since 1992, despite opposition party calls for the vote to be held next year. A Cabinet meeting has agreed on administrative measures to prepare for the general and presidential elections.
Angolan police plan to resume a crackdown on suspected diamond and other traffickers that has led to the expulsion of about 120Â 000 Congolese and 35Â 000 West Africans, a senior police official said. ”I am satisfied with the results of the first stage … in the coming weeks, the results will be even better,” a police official said.
About 15 000 people demonstrated at the weekend in Angola’s restive oil-rich Cabinda region to demand a truce between government forces and separatists fighting Luanda for about four decades. Shouting ”We want peace”, the demonstrators on Sunday took to the streets of the Cabinda capital.
The Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC) interior minister has told Angola that its mass expulsions of tens of thousands of Congolese is causing mayhem and appealed for cooperation. Angolan authorities have rounded up more than 60Â 000 foreigners, most of them from the DRC, over the past four months.
Angola’s ruling party on Thursday unveiled 14 preconditions for upcoming presidential and general elections, saying these had to be fulfilled before any ballot was held in the war-scarred country. ”We have to first fulfil these conditions and then prepare for the elections,” a party spokesperson said.