Marburg disease: a sample from a remote region of Tanzania is positive – National

Tanzania’s president announced Monday that a sample from a remote part of northern Tanzania had been infected with Marburg disease, a highly contagious virus that can kill up to 88 percent of people without treatment.

President Samia Suluhu Hassan spoke in the capital, Dodoma, together with the Director General of the World Health Organization, Theodore Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

The World Health Organization first reported the suspected outbreak in Marburg, which killed eight people in Tanzania’s Kajera region on January 14. Tanzanian health authorities disputed the report hours later, saying tests on the samples returned negative results.

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Hassan said Monday that further investigations had confirmed the Marburg case. Another 25 samples were negative, she said.

Like Ebola, the Marburg virus originated in fruit bats and is spread between people through close contact with the bodily fluids of infected people or through surfaces such as contaminated bedclothes.

Symptoms include fever, muscle aches, diarrhea, vomiting and, in some cases, death from massive bleeding. There is no approved vaccine or treatment for Marburg.

This is the second Marburg outbreak in Kajera since 2023. This comes a month after Rwanda, which shares a border with Kajera, declared its own outbreak of the disease over.

Rwandan authorities have reported a total of 15 deaths and 66 cases from the outbreak, which was first announced on September 27.