The World Health Organization suspects the death of eight people in Tanzania with the Marburg virus

The World Health Organization announced on Tuesday that a possible outbreak of Marburg virus disease in Tanzania has caused eight deaths, warning that the risk of the virus spreading in the African country and its neighboring countries is “high.”
“We are aware of nine cases so far, including eight deaths,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a post on the X platform. “We expect more cases in the coming days when disease surveillance will improve.”
He added, “The World Health Organization has offered its full assistance to the government of Tanzania and the affected communities.”

This warning comes less than a month after the World Health Organization announced a three-month outbreak of the Marburg virus in neighboring Rwanda, resulting in the death of 15 people.
Marburg virus causes highly contagious hemorrhagic fever. The virus is transmitted to humans from fruit bats and belongs to the same family as Ebola viruses.
The death rate for those infected with the disease can reach nearly 90 percent, and Marburg fever is often accompanied by bleeding and organ failure.
According to the World Health Organization, the Kagera region witnessed the first outbreak of the Marburg virus in March 2023. The outbreak continued that day for approximately two months, during which nine people were infected with the virus, six of whom died.
The organization noted in a statement that “zoonotic tanks, such as fruit bats, are still endemic in the region.”

The World Health Organization says that Marburg virus disease causes “severe viral hemorrhagic fever in humans, the symptoms of which include fever, headache, back pain, muscle pain, abdominal pain, vomiting, confusion, and diarrhea, as well as bleeding in the very late stages.”
She warns, “Although Marburg virus disease is rare, it still poses a serious threat to public health due to the high mortality rate and the lack of an effective antiviral treatment or vaccine.”
In its statement, the United Nations organization explained that the reason for its assessment of the risk of the spread of the virus in Tanzania at the national level as “high” is due to many worrying factors.
The most prominent of these factors is that the known death rate is high, reaching 89%, “the source of the outbreak is currently unknown,” and the reported cases are distributed over two regions, which indicates a “geographical spread” of the disease.
The organization pointed out that “the delay in detecting and isolating cases, in addition to ongoing contact tracing” indicates the lack of “complete information” about the outbreak of the disease.
As for its assessment of the risk of the virus spreading in the region being also high, the organization explained that the reason is “the strategic location of Kagera as a transit center with a large border movement of people to Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.”
She noted that some suspected cases were recorded in areas close to international borders, “which highlights the possibility of the disease spreading to neighboring countries.”