The World Health Organization reported this week that it has confirmed the death of an individual in Guinea of the infamous zoonotic disease (known to be carried in bats) named Marburg virus disease (MVD), which has 24 to 88% lethality, depending on what treatment its victims get, if any. It is the first known case of Marburg virus disease in Guinea and in West Africa, according to the WHO, although it has previously occurred in other areas of Africa. “The risk at the regional level is high,” because the individual lived in a village bordering on and well-connected to both Sierra Leone and Liberia, the WHO reports.
Guinea’s Ministry of Health, “together with the WHO, US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, ALIMA, Red Cross, UNICEF, The International Organization for Migration and other partners, have initiated measures to control the outbreak and prevent further spread. Contact tracing is ongoing, along with active case searching in health facilities and at the community level,” the WHO reported.
Only two months ago, Guinea had been declared free from an outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus, so the network of community health workers set up to deal with that outbreak and a WHO technical team which had remained in Guinea to support the government’s post-Ebola disease surveillance plan are now being “repurposed to support the government’s response activities to this outbreak of Marburg.”
