No end in sight to Angola's killer virus outbreak, says WHO

UIGE, Angola, April 13 (AFP) - There is no end in sight to the outbreak of the Marburg virus in Angola, a top expert from the World Health Organisation said 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.

Did not these stooges send out ~5000 dangerous H2N2 viral samples
to Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and everywhere else?

They have all the credibility of ..... Kofi Annan, Emperor-of-Terrorists.

"Although the WHO has tried to quell the fears of a resurfacing flu strain, they have failed to come up with a rationale explanation for the sequences at GenBank. Rather than quell fears, the concern about the WSN/33 sequences in Korean swine is increased by WHO's inability to produce a logical explanation.

WHO will be issuing a press release with more details on their failed efforts, but since the comments above have been published in Nature, it is worth briefly noting why WHO's efforts are a clear failure.

Although highly unlikely explanations have been offered, there really are only two likely explanations for the data at GenBank. The sequence data for six swine isolates have mixtures of human (H1N1 WSN/33) or avian (H9N2 Korean) genes.. As WHO consultants know from first hand knowledge, and the public knows from a write-up in Science, the sequences at GenBank were the subject of a manuscript submitted to Science. The Korean lab that submitted the sequences knew exactly what was publicly available at GenBank. Since there were six isolates of eight genes each and the genes were unique, there was little chance that the sequences were a mix-up or a deliberate fabrication.

These sequences clearly either represented reassorted and recombined genes as indicated by the sequences at GenBank, or they were H9N2 Korean avian sequences that somehow were contaminated with WSN/33 -like sequences. The former could be proven by an independent confirmation and the latter could be proven with sequences from H9N2 isolates with 8 avian genes.

WHO failed to find either. Thus, the issue remains unresolved. WHO is creating major questions on its competency to answer a simple question that raises significant public health concerns related to WSN/33 in swine on farms in Korea. Other issues are related to movement of WSN./33 sequences from a lab to swine either vi accidental or deliberate means.

WHO has only proven that it is unable to quickly resolve important public health and safety issues."

Nonsense. They value life as much as all sentient humans.

The outbreak is the result of human differentiation from green monkeys
and a virus that has been with them for part of that time.

01.025.0.01.001. Marburg virus [Location of isolation: Marburg; Germany]
CHARACTERISTICS: Filoviridae; 800-100 nm elongated filamentous virion, single stranded, negative sense RNA

Virus is assigned to the genus 01.025.0.01. "Marburg–like viruses"; family 01.025. Filoviridae; order 01. Mononegavirales.

EPIDEMIOLOGY: 1967 - outbreak in Germany and Yugoslavia following exposure to African green monkeys imported from East Africa (31 cases with 7 deaths); 1975 and 1982-4 cases reported in South Africa (originated in Zimbabwe); 1980 - two cases in Kenya

Virions have a complex construction and consist of an envelope, a nucleocapsid, a polymerase complex, and a matrix. Virions are enveloped. Virions are filamentous, or pleomorphic with extensive branching, or U-shaped, 6-shaped, or circular forms occur (particularly after purification) flexible; about 80 nm in diameter; 790 nm long (after purification). The surface projections are distinctive knob-shaped peplomers evenly covering the surface. They are spaced widely apart; evenly dispersed and embedded in a lipid bilayer. The surface projections comprise surface glycoproteins (GP) and are composed of one type of protein. Surface projections are 10 nm long; spaced 10 nm apart. The nucleocapsid exhibits helical symmetry. The nucleocapsid is helical; is cross-striated; 50 nm in diameter. Axial canal is distinct; in 20 nm in diameter; basic helix is obvious; pitch of helix is 5 nm. Morphologically aberrant forms are observe (after centrifugation).

The incubation period for hemorrhagic fever Marburg virus is 2 to 21 days.

Intrahepatic Marburg

Angola mounts fragile defence against deadly Marburg fever
By John Reed in Luanda
Published: April 14 2005 03:00 | Last updated: April 14 2005 03:00

Every evening at about 10pm, dozens of sleeping forms appear outside Luanda's Josina Machel hospital.

Angolans visiting relatives or seeking treatment at one of its rudimentary wards stretch out on the pavements and use a nearby lot as a toilet. The neighbouring paediatric hospital has a similar overflow crowd of mothers and children, also sleeping rough.

The scene would be alarming enough were Angola not struggling with an outbreak of the highly virulent Marburg haemorrhagic fever. The little-understood and incurable disease, which is spread through contact with blood, faeces and other bodily fluids, has caught the war-damaged African country unprepared and exposed gaping holes in its health and other infrastructure.

As of yesterday, 215 people were reported dead out of 235 confirmed and suspected cases, according to the United Nations and Angola's ministry of health. While past outbreaks of Marburg or the similar Ebola virus have been contained within three months, health officials will not hazard a guess when they might bring Angola's current one under control.

"We're not sure where we are in this current outbreak," said Dave Daigle of the World Health Organisation. "Our guys won't say whether we're at the beginning, in the middle or at the end."

Nearby countries, including Namibia, South Africa and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), have taken precautions at points of entry to prevent the disease from spreading. While eight cases have been reported in Luanda, the Angolan capital, the epidemic is centred in the northern province of Uige.

International and health officials seeking to prevent the disease's spread have struggled with bad roads and minimal mobile phone reception in the region, which is larger than Switzerland.

Angola's civil war, which lasted with brief interruptions from 1975 until 2002, devastated the country's health and other infrastructure. Sebastiao Veloso, the country's health minister, has said his budget accounts for only 3.8 per cent of government spending, a fraction of the 12-15 per cent of its budget the UN says Angola should spend on health.

Whereas the DRC has emergency protocols in place for epidemics after outbreaks of Marburg and Ebola, Angola lacks everything from disinfectant to properly trained medical personnel. Several dozen officials from the UN, the US Centres for Disease Control, and Médecins sans Frontières now in Uige are trying to fill the gap.

An MSF team sent to Uige in late March found the hospital where most of the cases were treated without water or electricity, and its morgue packed. The medical charity set about establishing an isolation unit and training staff in bio-security measures.

Angolan authorities have carved a path through the country's customs and immigration bureaucracy to allow foreign medical equipment and staff to enter quickly. The government quickly established an inter-ministerial working group, and began broadcasting radio and television messages warning people to report illnesses or sightings of bodies. "We've been pretty impressed by what they've accomplished with grossly limited resources," a western diplomat said.

Although the epidemic was not officially declared until March, health officials now believe the outbreak began in October, when Angola's rainy season begins. The damp weather normally brings a surge in deaths of children from malaria and other diseases, so officials did not raise the alarm for months.

Health workers screening children for measles and polio routinely saw symptoms typical of haemorrhagic diseases and sent blood samples to Atlanta for testing. Several tested positive for Marburg, and the epidemic was declared on March 21.

Health officials had as of yesterday identified 468 people in contact with Marburg cases.

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