The World Health Organization (WHO) on Sunday declared Ghana’s first outbreak of the Marburg virus disease after medical labs confirmed the infections in two cases reported earlier this month, reported The Reuters.
In a statement released on Sunday, the WHO said a preliminary analysis of samples from two patients from Ghana’s southern Ashanti region turned up positive, but were forwarded to the Institute Pasteur in Senegal’s Dakar for full confirmation. Notably, both the patients died and were unrelated.
The UN health agency lab corroborated the results from the Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research in Ghana.
The first case was a 26 year old male who got admitted to a hospital on June 26 and died on June 27. The second was a 51 year old who checked into a hospital on June 28 and died on the same day.
“This is the first time Ghana has confirmed Marburg Virus Disease,” the Ghana Health Service (GHS) head Patrick Kuma-Aboagye said in a statement.
It added that the GHS is working to reduce any risk of the virus spreading, including the isolation of all identified contacts, none of whom have developed any symptoms so far.
There is no current treatment for Marburg, which is almost as deadly as Ebola. The disease spreads to people by fruit bats and is transmitted among people through direct contact with bodily fluids of infected people and surfaces. It is a severe, often fatal illness with symptoms including headache, fever, muscle pains, vomiting blood and bleeding.
According to the WHO, the outbreak marks only the second time that the disease has been detected in West Africa, after Guinea confirmed a single case detected in August. The outbreak in Guinea was declared over five weeks later.
Previous Marburg outbreaks and individual cases have appeared in Angola, Congo, Kenya, South Africa and Uganda, WHO said.
