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Posted on 05/04/2005 12:42:04 AM PDT by Judith Anne
Welcome to the Marburg Surveillance Project.
This thread will be used for all of the latest Marburg Outbreak News and comments. This is the place to post all comments about the Marburg outbreak, all articles and links to articles about the Marburg outbreak.
We're going to use just one thread instead of having to go from article to article as we have in the past. We'll use this thread as long as we can.
Great idea!
Well, remember that even Angolan officials are talking about a 90% mortality rate--and that quote was from early April.
Yeah, kind of gets your attention, doesn't it??
We do not have access to raw data on these threads, because we only can find the "reported" data from the WHO and the Angolan Health Ministry. They report only summary data.
Therefore, I cannot provide the raw data (listing by individual patient and outcome) that you require. I apologize.
The details of this mortality (i.e. 100% except for 1 case) was determined from the summary data. Several of the reports indicated that the survival rate was zero. The historical listing by EBH lists the threads, but I do not remember specifically where the reports are. However, I note that in this community (FReepers discussing Marburg), we had inferred this quite some time ago. Indeed, I was directed toward a listing of the standard epidemiological equations, and was able to simplify and re-derive them because of the 100% mortality boundary condition.
My general sense is that the reported data have been significantly undercounting the real infection rate. If that is the case, the reported results will slowly approach the fitted growth curve. Too early to tell. It could also be that the recent increases were an abberation. Another poster pointed out (forgive me, I forget who), that the SARS epidemic showed similar aberrant behavior.
"We do not have access to raw data on these threads, because we only can find the "reported" data from the WHO and the Angolan Health Ministry. They report only summary data. "
I have a colleague who works with the CDC and WHO in this area of VHF. I will meet him today and see if he doesn't mind sending me his excel files containing the raw data. He is also an expert quantitative analyst. I suspect there will be pivot tables involved, if you like and there is no issue with providing third parties with this information, I will send the data in a spreadsheet. I suspect that may be a problem him even providing them to me. I have similar restrictions on data security for my influenza results when we send those to WHO and the CDC. until WHO and CDC make them public domain as a PDF we are usually unable to distribute the data.
Well in truth they are reporting fatalities but this latest information is staggering,and atypical of Marburg.
ALL of the infected medical personnel have died.
Past press reports put the number at 17, although yesterday I saw a reference upping the number to 19.
You would think that if anyone survived, it would be the medical people. That NONE have survived is quite significant.
Only one person is reported to have recovered, and that is questionable. No details were provided, not even how the person was treated. Nor did they address the question of whether the person was still contagious.
This is also much longer than an VHF outbreak should have lasted. But the stunning fatalities amongst the patient groups that have recieved clinical care is just well nothing short of staggering. words fail me
I guess I'm just over anxious to see your graphs now that the month of April has concluded. The first time I saw your graphs, it was a real eye opener for me. It illustrated so well how sharply the spread had increased in the more recent months, even with their revised numbers, as well as the potential for even greater spread of the disease. Your work is sincerely appreciated.
Cool.
If he has a problem with broadly distributing the data, perhaps you could to the analysis and report back. Depending on whether you can get the data, perhaps we could discuss methods for analyzing it. I have a couple of ideas.
Thanks
Yep.
We seem to have been through far more generations in this outbreak than in the past, and still no sign of genetic instability/burnout. Why not??
I also have questions about the blood tests used to confirm Marburg in this outbreak. We are having a high number of cases that fit the Marburg clinical profile, but the lab tests come back negative. If the lab tests are screening for antibodies produced by previous variants of Marburg, and this one is slightly different, would that explain the high number of negative test results?
It would seem some research is in order. A start might be genetic comparison between this variant of Marburg and past versions.
The medical people are the most likely to accept and cooperate with supportive treatment. Others may have been scared away by the high mortality observed in the hospital setting. We don't know the quality of the supportive treatment offered, thus we might be making an incorrect assumption about whether ideal treatment could have improved the outcome.
This new thread is land a big thanks to everyone for all the work and links.
Don't know how that happened :-)
Welcome back.
http://www.who.int/hac/crises/ago/appeal/Flash_2005_Angola.pdf
Something to read on a slow news day. Interesting. Price of Bleach went up 10x in April in Uige.
Maybe to some degree but what ideal treatment did you have in mind?
Correction to tagline
IV hydration attempts prevented by fragile blood vessels.
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