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Marburg still peaking - WHO
The headline and the quote below should say 'Marburg Still Not Peaking'. WHO's performance on this really has been dismal even by UN agency standards. They appear to have been the cause of the outbreak by using tainted needles in a childhood vaccination program and now sink to new lows here by blaming the Angolan people. They should be bringing in epidemiologists to find out how people are being infected and not continually repeating that infection results from contact with body fluids. Outside of a hospital setting, evidence from previous outbreaks is that contact with body fluids is not the primary cause of infection, it's contact with an unknown animal vector or tainted injections. There was a report yesterday that a family of 5 died within days of each other in Uige. This is strongly indicative of infection from a single external source not transmission within the family. Uige - There is no end in sight to the outbreak of the Marburg virus in Angola, a top expert from the World Health Organisation said on Wednesday, citing "massive problems" in mobilising Angolans to fight the Ebola-like bug in this northern city. "After four weeks, this epidemic is still peaking," said Pierre Formenty, the WHO's top specialist on new and dangerous diseases. "It has not been stopped, because we have massive problems in mobilising the community against it," he told AFP as the death toll from the deadly haemorrhagic fever hit 210. The length of the epidemic "really depends on the degree of the mobilisation by the Angolans, of the people itself, not only on the authorities... They don't realise that it could take months", Formenty said in an interview. A team of top scientists arrived last month in the northern city of Uige, the epicentre of the epidemic that was first detected in October. Their efforts have been met with fierce resistance and denial by many residents in Uige, who are shunning the hospitals and the specially-suited medical teams that roam the city in search of Marburg cases. "Uige is not a classic urban environment. It's a village with 200 000 inhabitants," said Formenty, a French doctor who has been on various WHO teams to combat a dozen similar deadly outbreaks, including Ebola which hit mainly rural areas in central Africa. "The difference between this outbreak of Marburg and previous outbreaks, including Ebola, is that this one is in an urban, confined area, while the others were in rural areas," said Tom Ksiazek, who heads the Atlanta-based centres for disease control's (CDC) special pathogens branch. "(That is what's making) this one more difficult to control," he told AFP. I think what he means is we don't know how tranmission occurs in an urban context. Apart from a lack of information to the public, despite the best efforts of the WHO, health experts are trying to battle the outbreak with the very little infrastructure left over from the country's civil war that ended in 2002. There is almost no running water and no electricity, except for a few homes running on generators in Uige. So bring in generators and water purification equipment. It aint rocket science. More experts are on their way to join the battle being fought by the WHO and Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF, Doctors without Borders). Posted by: phil_b 2005-04-14 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=61414 |