Tanzania's president said Monday that a sample from a remote area of northern Tanzania tested positive for Marburg disease, a highly infectious virus that can be fatal in up to 88 percent of cases without treatment.
President Samia Suluhu Hassan spoke in Dodoma, the capital, alongside World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
The WHO was the first to report on January 14 about a suspected Marburg outbreak that had killed eight people in the Kagera region of Tanzania. Tanzanian health officials disputed the report hours later, saying tests on samples had returned negative results.
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Hassan said on Monday that new tests had confirmed a case from Marburg. Twenty-five other samples were negative, he said.
Like Ebola, the Marburg virus originates in fruit bats and spreads between people through close contact with the body fluids of infected people or with surfaces, such as contaminated bed sheets.
Symptoms include fever, muscle aches, diarrhea, vomiting, and in some cases, death from extreme blood loss. There is no vaccine or approved treatment for Marburg.
This is Marburg's second outbreak in Kagera since 2023. It comes exactly a month after Rwanda, which shares a border with Kagera, declared its own outbreak of the disease over.
Rwandan authorities reported a total of 15 deaths and 66 cases in the outbreak first declared on September 27, and most of those affected were health workers who treated the first patients.
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