ARUSHA, Tanzania (AP) — Tanzania’s president said Monday that a sample taken from a remote area of northern Tanzania tested positive for Marburg disease, a highly infectious virus that can be fatal in 88% of cases. cases without treatment.
President Samia Suluhu Hassan spoke in the capital Dodoma alongside World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
The WHO was the first to report a suspected outbreak in Marburg on January 14 that killed eight people in the Kagera region of Tanzania. Tanzanian health officials disputed this information hours later, saying tests of samples had returned negative results.
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Hassan said Monday that further testing confirmed a Marburg case. Twenty-five other samples tested negative, she said.
Like Ebola, Marburg virus originates from fruit bats and spreads between people through close contact with the bodily fluids of infected individuals or with surfaces such as contaminated linens.
Symptoms include fever, muscle pain, diarrhea, vomiting and, in some cases, death from significant blood loss. There are no vaccines or approved treatments for Marburg.
This is the second Marburg outbreak in Kagera since 2023. It comes exactly a month after Rwanda, which shares a border with Kagera, declared its own outbreak over.
Rwandan authorities reported a total of 15 deaths and 66 cases during the outbreak first declared on September 27, with the majority of those affected being health workers who treated the first patients.
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This story has been corrected to show that the Tanzanian president spoke in Dodoma and not Dar es Salaam.
