Hemorrhagic Fever Virus

CaryP

Senior Member
Messages
1,432
Hemorrhagic Fever Virus

Okay, not wanting to alarm anyone, but we got some "bad" stuff going on in the world. For those of you who don't know what a hemorragic virus does, you bleed to death from all of your orifices and your organs. Not a great way to go. Check out ALL the stories on this link. I only posted the first two. Yeah, it's bad, real bad. Let's hope they can contain this one.

Cary

http://rense.com/general63/anomolousdeadlymarburg.htm




The WHO ruled out 2 other suspected cases reported in ? ? Portugal earlier this week following medical tests.
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Grayson

Conspiracy Cafe
Messages
1,117
Re: Hemorrhagic Fever Virus

Scary stuff, though not necessarily unnatural in ocurrence. These things are out there, waiting to prove that we are not the unnassailable super-predators that we think we are.

H G Wells was accurate in his prediction from War of the Worlds, only it won't be the Martians that these little buggers annihilate.
 

CaryP

Senior Member
Messages
1,432
Re: Hemorrhagic Fever Virus

Looks like the Marburg virus is spreading.

Cary


http://www.recombinomics.com/News/04080501...burg_Zaire.html

Marburg Virus Spreads to Zaire [font=Arial,Helvetica]
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Recombinomics Commentary
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April 8, 2005
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>> The Health Ministry said they control 230 people who had contact with infected people.
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? ? ? Luanda province registered eight cases, being two confirmed, two suspects and six deaths. Twenty people are also being monitored after having contacted affected people. ? ? ?
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? ? ? Uige received 11 alerts from different municipalities and two deaths and 200 contacts being monitored.
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? ? ? Kwanza-sul province is investigating six deaths that occurred from March 20 to April 02 who presented suggestive symptoms, in the municipalities of Amboim and Kilemba.
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? ? ? Zaire registered six deaths including one that happened today. <<
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The above detail demonstrates why the Marburg outbreak will not be quickly contained. ?The outbreak originated in Uige, where there are the most cases and the largest number being monitored. ?However, the virus has radiated out from Uige, and there is little monitoring in the outlying regions. ?Thus, the monitoring is chasing the virus, which continues to transmit ahead of the monitoring.
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Warnings last week indicated Uige was the Marburg epicenter, and all cases originated in Uige. ?This week warnings have gone out to countries adjacent to Angola (Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo, Namibia, and Zambia), warning that Angola is the epicenter. ?There are already reports of suspect cases in South Africa, including one death.
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The above update indicates Marbug has now spread to Zaire. ?WHO just announced Kwanza-sul yesterday, although the above report indicates there have been deaths there since March 20, and the spread to Kwanza-sul was reported earlier. ?Provinces previously reported, but not listed above include Cabinda, Kwanza-Norte, and Malange.
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The update on Luanda is most alarming because there is a population of 4 million and an international airport. ?
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There have been two widely reported cases in Cacuaco, a slum on the outskirts of Luanda. ?The first case was a 12 year-old, who began to hemorrhage badly two days after admission. ?She was then transferred to Americo Boa Verde in Luanda. ?There would have been many contacts at the clinic alone, because she did not initially present as a Marburg case, and when she was admitted March 25, the staff was poorly equipped with gloves, masks, and gowns. ?At that time there were already 6 other cases in Luanda, and since only 20 people are being monitored, many contacts of these initial cases are not being found.
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A 22 year-old patient was admitted April 6, and she too was hemorrhaging badly. ?Her transfer to Luanda was delayed because only one ambulance was available and risk of contamination of the vehicle was too high. ?
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These two cases highlight the difficulties in treating these patients and monitoring contacts. ?Controlling the spread of the virus in the slums near Luanda will be particularly challenging because of a high population density, and an increase in the number of people who want to leave the area.
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Thus, as the virus radiates out from Uige, controlling spread via contact tracing and quarantine will be increasingly difficult.
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CaryP

Senior Member
Messages
1,432
Re: Hemorrhagic Fever Virus

The Marburg virus isn't going away, and the mortality is coming in at 90%. Let's hope some poor soul infected with this thing doesn't get on a plane. That'd make "Typhoid Mary" look like joke.

Cary

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/17/internat....html?th&emc=th



April 17, 2005

? ? Stalking a Deadly Virus, Battling a Town's Fears

? ? By SHARON LaFRANIERE and <a href=\'http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?ppds=bylL&v1=DENISE%20GRADY&fdq=19960101&td=sysdate&sort=newest&ac=DENISE%20GRADY&inline=nyt-per\' target=\'_blank\'>DENISE GRADY</a> ?
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?GE, Angola, April 16 - For nearly four weeks, teams of health experts have been trying to set up a rescue operation in this town of windowless, crumbling buildings with no running water, intermittent electricity, poor sanitation and a perennially jammed telephone network.

?They are trying to contain the worst outbreak of one of the world's most frightening viruses, known as Marburg. But with the death toll rising every day, no one is predicting success soon.

?A cousin of Ebola, the Marburg virus has erupted periodically in Africa in sudden, gruesome epidemics, only to disappear just as mysteriously. This time it has struck with a vengeance, killing 9 out of 10 people infected - a total of 230 people so far, including 14 nurses and 2 doctors who cared for the sick.

?The virus is highly contagious, making any outbreak a cause for widespread fear and fascination in a world shrunk by international travel and trade. Marburg spreads through blood, vomit, semen and other bodily fluids. Even a cough can prove fatal for someone hit by a few drops of spittle. Corpses, teeming with the virus, are especially dangerous. A contaminated surface can be deadly - the virus can find its way into someone's eyes, nose or mouth, or enter the bloodstream through a cut.

?Once in the body, it moves with terrifying speed, invading white blood cells essential to fighting infection. On Day 3 of the infection, fewer than 200 viruses are in a drop of blood. By Day 8, there are five million.

? \"That's why dead bodies are kind of like bombs,\" said Dr. Heinz Feldmann, a virologist from Winnipeg who is here working with the teams of specialists dispatched by the World Health Organization, the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the international aid group Doctors Without Borders.

?Their efforts to curtail the outbreak turn on whether distrustful local people in this poor and isolated town of 50,000 people alert health workers to suspicious cases. So far, persuading them has not been easy. Victims who are taken to the isolation ward are never seen again; their bodies, rapidly buried for safety, cannot be honored in the traditional funerals so important in this country.

?Despite the best efforts of some dedicated doctors - like Maria Bonino, an Italian doctor who ran a children's ward in the U?ge hospital - the virus has a long head start, spreading for what may have been months from a brew of poverty, ignorance and government inaction.

?For the people of U?ge, rampant death is now joined by the near equivalent of a space invasion: health workers encased in masks, goggles, zip-up jump suits, rubberized aprons and rubber boots as they collect corpses in the stifling heat. The garb is all white, a symbol of witchcraft here.

?Teams of epidemiologists and provincial health workers have fanned out, checking reports of potential new cases and tracking down people who had contact with the dead or dying.

?So far, most reports from the community deal with the dead, not the sick. If that continues, the teams could be reduced to a high-tech, specialized burial service, helping prevent the transmission of the virus from the dead, but not from the living.

?At the cemetery on the edge of this town of pastel-colored, decaying buildings, a section created for Marburg victims is filling up with graves marked by simple wooden crosses bearing names written in black.

?But the 30-bed isolation ward for Marburg victims that was set up at the hospital here two weeks ago rarely has more than a patient or two. \"The population is hiding sick relatives,\" said Col. Pascoal Folo, a military doctor dispatched by the Angolan government to help coordinate the effort here. \"This upsets us very much.\"

? Every morning between 9 and 10 at the World Health Organization quarters on a busy street in U?ge, medical teams pile into jeeps and vans and head out into the neighborhoods - bairros, in Portuguese - that surround the town.

?The teams include a pair of doctors and several local people who have been hired to help the outsiders find their way. Except for knee-high rubber boots, which can be sprayed with bleach, they wear street clothes. Their job is to check out \"alerts\" - reports of possible cases - or deaths, and to look in on people who had close contact with someone who died of Marburg.

?This shoe-leather epidemiology - finding every case, tracing every contact, going door to door, day after day - is the backbone of the efforts here.

?\"This should be an easy day,\" William Pereira, a Colombian doctor who is in charge of all the surveillance teams, said on Wednesday. \"No deaths, no alerts.\" But no news might be bad news, he said, a sign that new cases were being hidden.

?Dr. Pereira's first stop on Wednesday was at the home of man whose wife, a nurse, had died of Marburg. He was not ill. Standing outside his house, curious neighbors looking on, he began berating and accusing the health team.

?Where did this disease come from? he demanded. Why didn't they just give him medicine, or a vaccine? When were they going to disinfect his house?

?There is no vaccine, Dr. Pereira told him. No medicine. All we can do is find the sick and isolate them so they cannot infect anybody else.

?Then it will be gone.

?On the way to their next stop, a message crackled across Dr. Pereira's radio: all teams back to headquarters.

?A van had been attacked by an angry crowd armed with sticks. The day before, rocks were thrown at a surveillance vehicle. The week before, all trips had been suspended for two days because of rock-throwing.

?Reluctantly, the health organization crossed three bairros off the list that surveillance teams could visit. Now, if anyone died or got sick there, health officials might not know - a breach of the defenses they were trying to build.

?Each person who may have been exposed to the disease has to be followed for 21 days, and hospitalized if symptoms develop. Symptoms usually appear within 5 to 10 days of infection.

?First come a headache, high fever, and aches and pains, followed by diarrhea and vomiting. The virus invades the spleen, liver and lymph nodes and then moves into other tissues all over the body, including skin and sweat glands.

?The disease interferes with blood clotting, and about half the victims hemorrhage. They may vomit blood and pass it in their urine, and bleed from their eyes, gums, rectum or vagina.

?It is a misconception that Marburg victims bleed to death, said Dr. Feldmann, the Winnipeg virologist. They actually die from shock as fluid leaks out of the blood vessels, causing blood pressure to drop.

?There is no specific treatment, but more patients would probably survive if they could get the kind of intensive care available in developed countries.

?In what is probably the only recorded outbreak outside Africa, in 1967, among laboratory workers in Germany and Yugoslavia, the death rate was only 23 percent. That outbreak was traced to monkeys imported from Uganda for medical research.

?The much higher death rate in Angola has brought international health care experts running.

?In U?ge, workers from Doctors Without Borders sleep five to a room. The World Health Organization's team has commandeered the only hotel and turned a wing of the provincial health department into a command center. The 19-person team includes epidemiologists, virologists, two anthropologists, a community outreach specialist, a computer programmer, two logistics experts and a press spokesman.

?Dr. Feldmann has created a high-tech laboratory at the U?ge Provincial Hospital with a four-hour turnaround for Marburg tests. Infection control experts are working furiously to disinfect wards, closed after the first suspected case was identified here, so that the 390 beds can be used again. Now, the hospital takes on patients who need emergency operations. When the cleaners did not show up Friday, the international experts took up the mops themselves.

? Adriano G. Duse flew into U?ge from Johannesburg, where he is head of infectious diseases at the University of Witwatersrand. \"We went to a meeting from 7:30 to 9, and after that it was scrubbing and scrubbing and mopping and swishing and scrubbing,\" he said, showing up for lunch in damp, soiled T-shirt.

? At a training session on Friday for cleaners and laundry workers, Dr. Michael Bell of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta was asked by workers how they could protect themselves.

?Was it safe to carry a bundle of used sheets and blankets on her head, one young woman wanted to know. \"No,\" Dr. Bell said. \"We want you to be safe.\"

?Armand Bejtullahu set up a computer program for the team to record each suspected death or new case and track hundreds of people who have had contact with infected Angolans. The computer analysis allows the doctors to map out geography of the epidemic and spot trends. Adults are gaining on children as primary victims.

?That data may help them, eventually, trace the virus back to its source.

? No one knows where the virus lurks between outbreaks. Some scientists say bats are its most likely host because they can be infected for long periods without showing symptoms. In this outbreak, tests have shown only one strain of virus, meaning the epidemic is likely to have started with the infection of one person. Finding out who that was may also help identify where the virus was hiding.

? Dr. Bonino, from the charity Doctors With Africa, began suspecting that there was something dreadful in the children's ward of the sprawling regional hospital in March of last year, months before anyone else became alarmed. The ward of 97 cots was crammed with youngsters suffering every ailment that Angola's oppressive climate and primitive sanitation could muster. She noted that one child stood out, suffering from vomiting, fever and bleeding, symptoms she recognized as classic indicators of hemorrhagic fever, her colleagues say. The child died within days.

?Dr. Bonino had worked for 15 years in Africa, including a spell in Uganda during an Ebola outbreak, and understood hemorrhagic fevers. She moved to U?ge in 2003, and won the loyalty of the children's ward nurses with her hard work, compassion and expertise in illnesses unique to Africa.

?\"She was very, very, very experienced, \" said Moco Henriques Beng, the provincial health director.

? In July, a new hospital director, Dr. Matondo Alexandre, was installed. He said Dr. Bonino quickly told him of the possible case of hemorrhagic fever. She pointed out another case in October, he said, and four blood and tissue samples were sent to the capital, Luanda, and then to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The tests, generally considered reliable, turned up negative; recent retests came up negative again.

?Between November and January, Dr. Alexandre said, he sent two more samples to Luanda, taken from people apparently killed by hemorrhagic fever. He said he got no response.

?Dr. Alexandre said the initial negative test results might have blinded the government. This is, after all, a country where one in four children dies before the age of 5; the causes for a slew of deaths on the pediatric ward could be legion.

?\"I think the results maybe influenced people to think that there is something normal going on, and this was just one disease out of so many diseases we have going on,\" he said.

?On the pediatric ward, though, the situation seemed anything but normal after October.

?More than 200 patients filled the ward, according to Luiza Maria Costa Pedro, the chief pediatric nurse, and two other doctors who worked at the hospital. Children slept two to a bed. Mattresses were spread upon the floor for those who could not fit in the bunks.

?Dr. Bonino was increasingly worried. \"She sat across from me in that chair and said we are having too many strange deaths,\" said Dr. Enzo Pisani, who works at the hospital, also for the Italian charity.

?Mrs. Costa Pedro said the children were admitted with vomiting, diarrhea and fever. Those symptoms are typical of malaria and many other tropical diseases. But after October, the death rate went up from three to five children a week to three to five a day, she said, and many died bleeding from the mouth or other orifices.

? \"We were very, very upset,\" she said. \"We didn't have any way to help the patients, and we couldn't discover who brought here this sickness.\"

?When national authorities failed to respond to requests for more tests, Dr. Alexandre took to the radio. In February, he announced that he suspected an outbreak of hemorrhagic fever in U?ge.

?Now, he said, he has been cast as a scapegoat. Traditional leaders, he said, circulated rumors that he had used witchcraft to create the virus in hopes of winning a job promotion, a charge that can carry substantial weight in a region where deep superstitions blend seamlessly with modern beliefs. He was dismissed as hospital director.

? His aunt was beaten by angry residents, he said. Last week, national authorities sent a helicopter to carry him and his family to Luanda.

?The radio broadcast did, however, provoke the national Health Ministry to send a team to U?ge in early March. The World Health Organization quickly followed.

? Dr. Bonino gave the arriving teams a list of 39 suspected cases of hemorrhagic fever. The investigators found two dozen more. New samples were flown to Atlanta.

?On March 21, 9 of 12 came back positive.

?Less than a week later, Dr. Bonino died of Marburg virus. Fourteen nurses and a Vietnamese surgeon who worked at the hospital have also died. The surgeon was probably infected while performing an autopsy on a Marburg victim, Dr. Pisani said.

?On the whiteboard mounted on a wall in the pediatric ward, Dr. Bonino's cellphone number is still scrawled.

? \"I feel a tremendous sense of failure because she died,\" Dr. Pisani said. \"We should have sent samples earlier.\"

?Dr. Alexandre said many deaths might have been prevented had the authorities acted more rapidly.

?\"The emergency public health service should have begun investigating right in October, or at least in November,\" he said. \"What happened was we lost a lot of time.\"

?Even now, health experts say, Angola's government has failed to mount a full-scale response to the epidemic, leaving the bulk of the burden to the outside groups that have come to U?ge. The government has sent only four or five medical specialists to the province, and 30 to 35 soldiers, who are mainly helping to collect and bury bodies.

?Unless the government does a better job of explaining the epidemic to its people, the health workers fear, they face a long, uphill battle.

?\"What we are doing now is having almost no impact,\" said Monica de Castellarnau, who headed the Doctors Without Borders team here until Friday. \"We cannot replace the government.\"

? ?
 

Cornelia

Member
Messages
234
Re: Hemorrhagic Fever Virus

Cary, we are twin souls as usual :lol:
I'm so worried for this whole Marburg thing. 95% mortality sounds really bad. Also, what if people there begin to flee to avoid the plague? What if one of them jump over a plane? Can't even think of it.
I remember that just for some SARS cases they closed the flight to and from Canada... why this time nobody is doing anything? The news don't ever mention it. And the plague is comletely out of control (read recombinant.com, they are very updated).
About those italian meds, they were not ill but kept in quarentine.But an italian pediatrician was among the first dead. That place is full of international volunteers... God help us if one of them come home undetected.
 

denbo88

Junior Member
Messages
63
Re: Hemorrhagic Fever Virus

When I read The Hot Zone by Richard Preston, Marburg sounded under rated since Ebola was getting all the press back then. I am amazed that we have managed to avoid pan epidemics in light of how much people travel the world these days. These infectious diseases can travel the world within 24 hours they say. This one supposedly came from infected monkeys. I'll tell you, my friend had a monkey and they are one dirty animal!!! I always wondered about what people ate in these third world countries. It dawned on me that they would just eat whatever they could catch.
 

PyRo99

Active Member
Messages
567
Re: Hemorrhagic Fever Virus

I don't think they care, let alone want to try and contain it.

I'm sure this will make the plague look like a thumb tack.

Keep posting.
 

denbo88

Junior Member
Messages
63
Re: Hemorrhagic Fever Virus

Believe me they care, even if it's out of self-interest. They don't want to catch it later, or their families. When your neighbor pulls out his garden hose to help put out the fire on your roof, it's also because he doesn't want the fire to spread to his house.
 

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