For example, contact with bat droppings in caves can cause infections in people. This includes materials like bedding and clothing contaminated with these fluids.īut there’s a great deal we don’t know. There can also be human-to-human transmission via direct contact (through broken skin or mucous membranes) with the blood, secretions, organs, or other bodily fluids of infected people and with surfaces and materials. In the case of the monkeys from Uganda imported into Marburg, laboratory staff obviously got infected through contact with the tissues and the blood of the monkeys. It is spread through contact with materials (fluids, blood, tissues, and cells) of an infected host or reservoir.

The Washington Post/The Washington Post/Getty Images How does it spread? While the host, or reservoir, of the virus, is not conclusively identified, the virus has been associated with fruit bats.

In 2008, two independent cases were reported in travelers who had visited a cave inhabited by Rousettus bat colonies in Uganda. Serological studies have also revealed evidence of past Marburg virus infection in Nigeria. Most were in Africa - Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, South Africa, and more recently, Guinea and Ghana. Of 31 cases associated with these outbreaks, seven people died.Īfter the initial outbreaks, other cases have been reported in different parts of the world. The laboratory staff got infected as a result of working with the materials (blood, tissues, and cells) of the monkeys. It came from monkeys imported from Uganda for laboratory studies in Marburg. There were simultaneous outbreaks in both cities. It was first reported in 1967 in a town called Marburg in Germany and in Belgrade, Yugoslavia (now Serbia).

It has varied between 24 percent and 88 percent in different outbreaks depending on virus strain and case management. The virus, which belongs to the same family as the Ebola virus, causes severe viral hemorrhagic fever in humans with an average case fatality rate of around 50 percent. Marburg virus causes the Marburg virus disease (MVD), formerly known as Marburg hemorrhagic fever. What is the Marburg virus, and where did it come from? The Conversation Africa’s Wale Fatade and Usifo Omozokpea asked virologist Oyewale Tomori about its origin and how people can protect themselves against the disease. In July 2022, Ghana confirmed its first two cases of the deadly Marburg virus, a highly infectious disease in the same family as the virus that causes Ebola.

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