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Angolan town fights killer virus

Angolan health workers treat a 22-year-old woman last week, a new suspected case of the Marburg hemorrhagic fever in a clinic in Cacuaco township, outside Luanda, where the Ebola-like virus has killed at least 155 people. A senior UN official warned that the outbreak of the Ebola-like epidemic was not yet under control. PHOTO: AFP

Fear stalked the streets on Saturday in this squalid northern Angolan town devastated by years of civil war, now the epicenter of an outbreak of the killer Marburg virus which has claimed 180 lives so far.

In Uige Province alone, some 160 people have been killed by the virus which has claimed 98 percent of those infected in the outbreak, described by the UN as "the worst ever" and "not yet under control."

In Uige town, where fierce fighting between government and rebel troops in Angola's civil war raged until about two years ago, health workers dressed in head-to-toe "Ebola suits" were on their way to pick up a man dying from haemorrhagic fever, as residents struggled to continue with their daily lives under the constant threat of death.

"We are afraid here all the time," said Octavio Vicente, 25, a Uige resident who works for the UN's World Food Program.

"People are scared here. They are scared to go to the hospital, because that is where everybody got sick," he said at the town's small and run-down airport, which still bears pock-marked bullet holes from the war.

The Ebola-like Marburg virus, whose exact origin is unknown, spreads through contact with bodily fluids such as blood, excrement, vomit, saliva, sweat and tears, but can be contained with relatively simple health precautions, according to experts.

The oubreak has spread to seven of Angola's 18 provinces, and has overtaken an earlier Marburg outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo as the largest ever recorded. It was first detected in 1967 when German laboratory workers in Marburg were infected by monkeys from Uganda.

Health workers battling the disease say they have met with heavy resistance from some local communities in Uige.

Normally, custom here dictates that families spend a lot of time with the bodies of the dead before they dispose of the corpse. But that is when the virus is most virulent.

"You can imagine a team coming, taking a child away to the hospital and three days later the family learns that the child is already dead and buried," said Alain Epelboin, French anthropologist of the Paris-based National Center for Scientific Research.

Amada Pedro, 23, a Uige resident, said: "The people say the sick are not animals to be buried like this. The population is revolted and are throwing stones at the teams who are going to pick up the corpses."
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