A sample from a remote Tanzanian region tests positive for Marburg
disease, confirming WHO fears
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[January 21, 2025]
ARUSHA, Tanzania (AP) — Tanzania’s president said Monday that one
sample from a remote part of northern Tanzania tested positive for
Marburg disease, a highly infectious virus which can be fatal in up to
88% of cases without treatment.
President Samia Suluhu Hassan spoke in Dodoma, the capital, alongside
World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
WHO was the first to report on Jan. 14 a suspected outbreak of Marburg
that had killed eight people in Tanzania’s Kagera region. Tanzanian
health officials disputed the report hours later, saying tests on
samples had returned negative results.
Hassan said Monday that further tests had confirmed a case of Marburg.
Twenty-five other samples were negative, she said.
Like Ebola, the Marburg virus originates in fruit bats and spreads
between people through close contact with the bodily fluids of infected
individuals or with surfaces, such as contaminated bedsheets.

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A medical worker carries a meal to an isolation tent housing a man
being quarantined after coming into contact with a carrier of the
Marburg Virus, at the Kenyatta National Hospital in Nairobi, Kenya,
Oct. 8, 2014. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis, File)
 Symptoms include fever, muscle
pains, diarrhea, vomiting and in some cases death from extreme blood
loss. There is no authorized vaccine or treatment for Marburg.
This is the second outbreak of Marburg in Kagera
since 2023. It comes exactly a month after Rwanda, which shares with
a border with Kagera, declared its own outbreak of the disease was
over.
Rwandan officials reported a total of 15 deaths and 66 cases in the
outbreak first declared on Sept. 27, with the majority of those
affected health care workers who handled the first patients.
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