An outbreak of hemorrhagic fever that has claimed the lives of 96 people, many of them children, in northern Angola has been caused by the Marburg virus, Angola's deputy health minister said Tuesday.
The Marburg disease, a severe form of hemorrhagic fever in the same family as Ebola, was first recognized in 1967 and is indigenous to Africa, affecting both humans and primates.
Angolan Deputy Health Minister Joseph Van Dunem said results from 12 samples sent to the US Centers for Disease Control had detected the virus.
"We have received the results," Van Dunem told a news conference. "We are dealing with the Marburg virus."
Van Dunem said 96 people had died out of 107 cases reported at the main provincial hospital in the northern Uige region.
Recorded cases of the disease have appeared only in a few places in Africa, the last dating back 18 years, according to medical Web sites.
The disease kills around one in every four and specific treatment for it was unknown.
The fever from the Marburg virus becomes increasing severe after an incubation period of five to 10 days, with symptoms including jaundice, inflammation of the pancreas, severe weight loss, shock, delerium, massive hemorrhagic and organ dysfunction.
The first cases of the mystery illness were detected in the northern Uige region in November but health officials last week said they did not believe that they were dealing with an outbreak of Ebola, which kills by inducing massive internal hemorrhages.
Most of those affected by the disease are children aged under five, according to the WHO.
The WHO has expressed concern over the fact that children were the main victims, saying in general hemorrhagic fevers like the one caused by the Ebola virus hit all age groups without distinction.
The Marburg disease first broke out simultaneously in laboratories in Marburg and Frankfurt in Germany, and in Belgrade, then Yugoslavia (now Serbia) in 1967.
Some 37 people became ill and the first to be infected had beaccordingen exposed to African green monkeys or their tissue.
In Marburg, the monkeys had been imported for research and to prepare a polio vaccine, according to US-based online medical publishing company MedicineNet.com
The monkeys which caused the 1967 outbreak arrived from Uganda.
No other case was recorded until 1975, when a traveller most likely exposed in Zimbabwe became ill in Johannesburg, South Africa -- and passed it to his travelling companion and a nurse.
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