The World Health Organization (WHO) announced on Tuesday that a suspected outbreak of the Marburg virus in Tanzania had killed eight people, stressing that the risk of spread in the country and region was “high”.
“We are aware of nine cases so far, including eight deaths. We expect more cases in the coming days as disease surveillance improves,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on X.
Marburg causes a highly infectious hemorrhagic fever. It is transmitted by certain bats and belongs to the same family as the Ebola virus. Its mortality rate rises to almost 90%.
The UN agency said it informed its member states on Monday of an “outbreak of suspected Marburg virus disease in the Kagera region”, located in northwestern Tanzania.
This region had already been the scene of a first outbreak in Marburg in March 2023, which lasted almost two months and resulted in 9 recorded cases including 6 deaths, according to the WHO.
The WHO also declared that the risk at the national level was “high” due to several worrying factors, notably citing the fact that “the source of the outbreak (is) currently unknown”.
She added that the risk of spread at the regional level was also “high”, due to the “strategic location of Kagera”, a region through which Tanzanians transit on their way to “Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The announcement of this new epidemic comes less than a month after the WHO declared the end of an epidemic of Marburg fever in neighboring Rwanda, which lasted three months and left 15 dead.
