LUANDA: Angola’s killer Marburg outbreak has yet to be brought under control but the virus is not contagious enough to make it a serious global threat, a senior US scientist said. Spread through blood, sweat, tears and saliva, the Ebola-like virus has killed 244 people across Angola, a southern African country still struggling to recover from a 27-year civil war and ill-equipped to tackle the health threat.
The worldwide response has been massive but US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention expert Tom Ksiazek said the fight is not yet won.
“I don’t think it’s under control but I don’t think it’s out of control either,” he said in Luanda on Thursday.
“I don’t think it’s that dangerous in global terms. It doesn’t have the ability to go through the general community. The common cold is a lot more transmittable.”
Most of the dead — some treated in isolation wards by staff in full body protective gear — have been medical staff or relatives caring for victims of the disease and in close contact with victims’ body fluids.
The United Nations World Health Organization and local health officials are working hard in the northern province of Uige, the centre of the outbreak, to persuade residents to bring sick relatives to hospital instead of caring for them at home.
The 266 cases so far have been limited to Uige or to travellers recently returned from the region. But even if the disease jumped to Luanda — a city of 4 million — the number of cases would be limited, Ksiazek said.
“It’s not jumping through the community by people touching each other or sneezing in the faces of other people,” said the former US Army doctor who now heads the CDC’s Special Pathogens Unit and who arrived in Angola soon after the outbreak was identified.
Even in Luanda’s slums, any Marburg outbreak would likely be limited to some medical staff and immediate family with close contact with the sick, he said.
LIMITED DANGER: But while Uige markets remain open and most of the province’s half a million people have felt little direct impact from the disease, many elsewhere in Angola still feel they must take precautions.
When several shoe-shine boys approached a journalist at Luanda airport after his return from Uige, the mere mention of the area sent them scattering.
At a military airstrip well outside Uige city, crew on cargo planes wore surgical masks to unload disinfectant and medical supplies even though they never set foot on the ground, while World Food Programme drivers refuse to go to the area.
Despite the alarm that has accompanied each outbreak of Ebola and Marburg — due in part to the horrific speed with which the viruses kill — Ksiazek said that if either disease ever reached a Western city like New York, London or Paris it could be easily controlled.
“If a traveller is ill with the virus and pitches up at a Western hospital with proper infection control the risk of transmission isn’t that great,” he said, noting that modern hygiene standards would prevent most of the contact with bodily fluids that helps spread the virus in poorer countries.
The chances of either virus mutating — for example to become airborne and thereby much more contagious — were low, he said.
“People are always concerned about the possibility of that, but we know from tests that there is not a tendency for these viruses to change significantly,” he said.—Reuters
Dear visitor, the comments section is undergoing an overhaul and will return soon.