Hussein Bogere
3 August 2007
NEARLY 100 people countrywide are being monitored for possible signs of the Marburg viral disease, which has so far claimed one life.
Twenty of the people being monitored live in Kampala, a senior Ministry of Health official said yesterday.
And 70 of those under surveillance are employees of the now-closed Kitaka gold mine in Kamwenge District, said Dr Sam Zaramba, the director general health services.
"We are monitoring those who came into close contact with these patients," Dr Zaramba said. "We are also monitoring the workers in the gold mine. In total there are just fewer than 100 people being monitored."
Junior health minister Richard Nduhuura told Parliament on Wednesday: "We have one confirmed case of Marburg virus disease who died on July 14, 2007. The second suspected case has fully recovered. Both cases are gold miners from Kitaka Mine located in Kakasi Forest Reserve in Kamwenge District."
Marburg hemorrhagic fever, experts say, is a rare but severe type of disease that causes generalised bleeding in humans. Its symptoms include sudden onset of high fever, headache, and muscle pain, followed by a body rash, and bleeding tendencies.
It emerged yesterday that Ministry of Health officials were put on alert a few days ago after a suspected Marburg fever patient who had travelled from the Kitaka mine was discovered in Kyebando, a Kampala residential neighbourhood north of Kampala.
The suspect spent nine days in Mulago Hospital where he had gone for treatment following a fever attack.
The patient who died checked into a private hospital in Kampala.
A doctor from the hospital said: "We received the patient a month ago suspected to be suffering from that fever. We isolated the patient; unfortunately he passed away. Samples were sent to the Virus Research Institute [in Entebbe] and the Centres for Disease Control [in the United States].
"The results confirmed that the patient had died of that fever. It is upon that confirmation that we notified the Ministry of Health."
Dr Zaramba said that although ministry experts are closely monitoring suspected patients, no cases of actual infection have been registered since.
For ethical reasons, Dr Zaramba declined to name the exact location where a Ministry of Health team is carrying out the monitoring, but the experts have taken blood samples of people that patients or those suspected to be patients came into contact with.
The Marburg hemorrhagic fever was detected in Kamwenge District last month. To contain Marburg, the government has established a multi-disciplinary task force made up of national and international experts similar to the one that contained the Ebola outbreak in northern Uganda in 2000.
Irin News reported on Wednesday that experts had been sent to Kamwenge, Mityana, and Kayunga, the areas where the contacts with the Marburg sufferers are reported to have gone.
Transmission of the virus is limited to very close contact with blood and body fluids of infected people. The incubation period of the virus is between five to 10 days, but health officials are not leaving anything to chance. They are monitoring suspects for longer periods.
In his Wednesday statement, Dr Nduhuura said that failure to register a new case within two incubation periods would indicate containment of the fever, which was first reported in Uganda in 1977.
It claimed 19 lives in Nakibembe Village in Busesa, Bugiri District at the time.
Basically, if one goes 21 days without showing signs after contact with a patient, that person is declared free of the virus.
Some 377 Marburg cases have been reported worldwide since 1967.
Marburg also affects non-human primates such as monkeys, gorillas and chimpanzees, and for that reason, Dr Zaramba said, experts suspect that monkeys and bats in the Kakasi Forest could be the hosts of the virus.
He advised the public to "look out for any fevers or bleeding. Once these signs are spotted, one should run to the nearest health unit".
He said that the ministry is still waiting for results from the blood samples drawn from the gold miners and sent to the Centres for Disease Control in Atlanta, USA, before any confirmation of actual infections can be made. He did not say when those results will be ready.
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