United States: The president of Tanzania confirmed on Monday that one sample has turned out to be positive for the deadly Marburg virus disease.
The samples were collected from the distant northern region. The disease has been confirmed to have a fatality rate of up to 88 percent, with no treatment available.
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A public conference was conducted jointly by the World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus with the nation’s President Samia Suluhu Hassan in Dodoma.
WHO announced on January 14 the discovery of suspected Marburg cases that caused eight deaths in the Kagera region of Tanzania.
The health ministry in Tanzania rejected the report just hours after releasing test results showing no signs of the virus, US News reported.
However, Hassan announced on Monday that laboratory tests revealed one person tested positive for Marburg. Health officials tested 26 samples and found no evidence of the virus in 25 of them.
Just like Ebola, the Marburg virus appears first in fruit bats and spreads across humans when people meet infected bodily fluids or clean surfaces like infected bed linens.
Symptoms of the disease
A person develops a high fever alongside muscle aches, then progresses to diarrhea and vomiting before dying from critical blood loss. No one has created an approved treatment or vaccine to fight the Marburg virus.
Kagera region has experienced two Marburg outbreaks since we began tracking in 2023, US News reported.
The discovery came one month to the day after Rwanda confirmed its final Marburg case along its shared border: Kagera.
During the initial Marburg outbreak in Rwanda that started September 27, health workers bore the highest risk as 66 patients tested positive and suffered most of the 15 fatalities.