MARBURG - Where did it come from???

A brief news item carried in this newspaper last week ran as follows: "Angola’s killer Marburg epidemic has claimed nine more victims this week bringing the death toll to 126 … All cases of the killer hemorrhagic fever, which is from the same family as Ebola, have so far originated from Uige Province but the authorities have expressed fears it could spread to other parts of the country, including the capital Luanda.

"The mortality rate is frightening with only six survivors so far out of 132 recorded cases, and more of them may yet succumb. Marburg is characterised by headaches, nausea, vomiting and diarrhea accompanied by blood and is spread through bodily fluids including saliva and perspiration."

Why is a disease with a foreign name wiping out innocent people in the heart of Africa? To get a rough answer to this question, we need to double back 10 years to an American writer known as Richard Preston and his rather strange book, The Hot Zone.

According to Preston, new human-immune-system ravaging germs most likely emerged form bat guano on the floor of Kitum cave in Southwestern Kenya during the 1970s.

[article continues at www.eastandard.net... ]

[edit on 11-4-2005 by Byrd]

Hey dzez2003, interesting post, but it's bad form to post entire articles and not give your own opinion. You should shorten the quote to a few pertinent paragraphs and give us your analysis/opinion on the article. We'd like to read what you think too.

www.eastandard.net...
A brief news item carried in this newspaper last week ran as follows: "Angola’s killer Marburg epidemic has claimed nine more victims this week bringing the death toll to 126 … All cases of the killer hemorrhagic fever, which is....

Hope you weren't trying to pass it off as your own...that would be unsportsmanlike.

i thought that all the hemorrhagic virus' had been around for centuries LONG before the initial outbreaks that the CDC was involved in during the 60's..........

i'm going to go and do a bit of research on this before i get too involved.

but i swear i thought the virus's had been around before there was any such thing as vaccines and any type of manipulation of genes,virus's or whatnot by scienctists............

i read the hot zone............and that's when i first became aware of these NASTIES and what they could do to humans........i thought it was a really interesting book.


angie

alright.........this is preliminary as this will take a while.........

but this is off the CDC website.........

here's the link and summary of marburg........
www.cdc.gov...

What is Marburg hemorrhagic fever?

Marburg hemorrhagic fever is a rare, severe type of hemorrhagic fever which affects both humans and non-human primates. Caused by a genetically unique zoonotic (that is, animal-borne) RNA virus of the filovirus family, its recognition led to the creation of this virus family. The four species of Ebola virus are the only other known members of the filovirus family.

Marburg virus was first recognized in 1967, when outbreaks of hemorrhagic fever occurred simultaneously in laboratories in Marburg and Frankfurt, Germany and in Belgrade, Yugoslavia (now Serbia). A total of 37 people became ill; they included laboratory workers as well as several medical personnel and family members who had cared for them. The first people infected had been exposed to African green monkeys or their tissues. In Marburg, the monkeys had been imported for research and to prepare polio vaccine.


Where do cases of Marburg hemorrhagic fever occur?

Recorded cases of the disease are rare, and have appeared in only a few locations. While the 1967 outbreak occurred in Europe, the disease agent had arrived with imported monkeys from Uganda. No other case was recorded until 1975, when a traveler most likely exposed in Zimbabwe became ill in Johannesburg, South Africa – and passed the virus to his traveling companion and a nurse. 1980 saw two other cases, one in Western Kenya not far from the Ugandan source of the monkeys implicated in the 1967 outbreak. This patient’s attending physician in Nairobi became the second case. Another human Marburg infection was recognized in 1987 when a young man who had traveled extensively in Kenya, including western Kenya, became ill and later died. In 1998, an outbreak occurred in Durba, Democratic Republic of the Congo. Cases were linked to individuals working in a gold mine. After the outbreak subsided, there were still some sporadic cases that occurred in the region.


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it was RECOGNIZED in 67 but that doesn't mean that it didn't exist prior....i'm not totally buying it to the virus being manufactured.......but i'm not ruling out either...........just trying to look at all sides..........


angie

ok more info........

the entire family of hemorrhagic virus' fall under the FILOVIRUS family

more from CDC

www.cdc.gov...

What are filoviruses?
Filoviruses belong to a virus family called Filoviridae and can cause severe hemorrhagic fever in humans and nonhuman primates. So far, only two members of this virus family have been identified: Marburg virus and Ebola virus. Four species of Ebola virus have been identified: Ivory Coast, Sudan, Zaire, and Reston. Ebola-Reston is the only known filovirus that does not cause severe disease in humans; however, it can be fatal in monkeys.

When were the members of the filovirus family first recognized?
The first filovirus was recognized in 1967 when a number of laboratory workers in Germany and Yugoslavia, who were handling tissues from green monkeys, developed hemorrhagic fever. A total of 31 cases and seven deaths were associated with these outbreaks. The virus was named after Marburg, Germany, the site of one of the outbreaks.

After the initial outbreaks, the virus disappeared. It did not reemerge until 1975, when a traveler, most likely exposed in Zimbabwe, became ill in Johannesburg, South Africa. The virus was transmitted there to his traveling companion and a nurse. A few sporadic cases of Marburg hemorrhagic fever have been identified since that time.

Ebola virus was first identified in 1976 when two outbreaks of Ebola hemorrhagic fever (Ebola HF) occurred in northern Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) and southern Sudan. The outbreaks involved what eventually proved to be two different species of Ebola virus; both were named after the nations in which they were discovered. Both viruses showed themselves to be highly lethal, as 90% of the Zairian cases and 50% of the Sudanese cases resulted in death.

Since 1976, Ebola virus appeared sporadically in Africa, with small to midsize outbreaks confirmed between 1976 and 1979. Large epidemics of Ebola HF occurred in Kikwit, Zaire in 1995 and in Gulu, Uganda in 2000. Smaller outbreaks were identified in Gabon between 1994 and 1996. For information on known Ebola HF cases and outbreaks, please refer to the chronological list .

What are the natural hosts of filoviruses?

It appears that filoviruses are zoonotic, that is, transmitted to humans from an ongoing life cycles in animals other than humans. Despite numerous attempts to locate the natural reservoir or reservoirs of Ebola and Marburg viruses, their origins remain undetermined. However, because the virus can be replicated in some species of bats, some types of bats native to the areas where the virus is found may prove to be the viruses’ carriers.



angie

"Marburg virus in the liver of an experimentally infected monkey. Virions bud off the surface membrane of liver cells and accumulate in the narrow spaces between cells. This infection is extremely destructive—shortly after this phase of infection the liver cells are destroyed. The uniformly cylindrical virions are sectioned in various planes—some are seen in longitudinal-section, some in cross-section, some in between. Magnification approximately x12,000"

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov...

Everything you never wanted to know about marburg..................

dr h.................do you think that the filo viruses are lab created or a fact of nature????

i'm trying to form my opinion on it............


as of right now i'm leaning toward a fact of nature..........that has crossed over to humans.........

angie

Originally posted by amb1063
dr h.................do you think that the filo viruses are lab created or a fact of nature????

i'm trying to form my opinion on it............


as of right now i'm leaning toward a fact of nature..........that has crossed over to humans.........

angie

Angie, Look at logic, how can something so deadly have survived in nature? It should have killed off itself off long ago. These viruses only arrived "after" stanleyville happened in the 1950's. Just as AIDS happened after the arrival of the moon rocks in the 1970's. Fact one of the astronauts of the moon missions had a son who was born with immune disorder "the bubble boy". Shortly after that AIDS hit the planet. Still all was after stanleyville. So no matter how one looks at the facts "man" has altered a natural virus. The is just so much data. The russians, the chinese, the US were all involved in Rawanda too.

hhmmmm

i'll keep researching.............as i said............i'm still forming my opinion.......

hard to believe..................no not really i guess...........thanks for the input.

i'm all about being open minded...........so i'll just keep digging!!

thanks dr h


angie

Originally posted by DrHoracid

Originally posted by amb1063
dr h.................do you think that the filo viruses are lab created or a fact of nature????
i'm trying to form my opinion on it............
as of right now i'm leaning toward a fact of nature..........that has crossed over to humans.........

angie

Angie, Look at logic, how can something so deadly have survived in nature?

DrH, it's a zoonosis -- a disease that crosses species. medicine.bu.edu...

There are lots of diseases (and parasites) that are NOT harmful or fatal to animals that are very harmful or fatal to humans. Leprosy (to use an example that everyone will have heard of) has no effect on its carrier species, the armadillo: medicine.bu.edu...

The species that hosts it without harm is called a "reservoir species" in epidemiology and any disease that has a nonhuman reservoir (as flu does) is almost impossible to get rid of.

You make my point. The crossover of many virus happened at stanleyville. Direct blood contamination of primates into humanity on a mass scale.

After the spanish flu outbreak there is much 'speculation" that all other outbreaks since that time are 'man-made".

Microbiology in the late 1950's was also without protocol in place to prevent species crossover. Example no knowledge of prions. Prions could be the "missing" link of many many diseases............

Found this article rather interesting....

www.recombinomics.com...

thanks for that link Britguy, nice to know that things can and will worsen the more you stall, in this case the slow to act medical intervention concerning the initial children that became infected with Marburg Disease. Reminds me of AIDS in the early 1980's, when it was only deemed a Gay Disease, that's until Celebrity Heterosexuals and Haemophilia inflicted persons came down with the diseases surrounding HIV.

I've been educating myself concerning these Prions that keep being mentioned in connection with all kinds of diseases, perhaps they are the missing-link/holy grail to understanding pathological species.

keep researching, keep your heads up!

There are now 203 confirmed deaths and WHO says the situation is out of control...





norwegian source... (yes, it´s in norwegian...)

Heard about this, apparently it is an ebola-ish virus, except it's an airborne virus.

Let's pray to God that this doesn't get out of control, it could do some serious damage..

-wD

The real problem here is the lack of medical professionals (including epidemiologists) in Angola. They're going to have to do a lockdown of the area, and that's very hard with panicked people trying to run away from the horrible disease. This also involves a lot of risk to the field workers who work there, because the ONLY way to find out who's contacted who and who might be at risk is a foot-to-foot survey of the villages.

Between the disease and other ocnditions there, it's not a job for the faint-hearted.

Computer modeling can help to determine how bad the outbreak CAN get:
www.worldchanging.com...://www.worldchanging.com/archives/002268.html

The problem is, the places that have this software (and the GPS databases to run it against) are in the first world countries. Angola is a third world country.

(note: the math model used for this (a variant of the Erdos "Small Worlds" algorithmn) is one of the models I'm looking at in modeling associations in cyberspace for one of my anthropology papers)

Originally posted by Byrd
They're going to have to do a lockdown of the area, and that's very hard with panicked people trying to run away from the horrible disease.

I agree with you 100%, in fact I was reading the news coverage on a daily basis and several days earlier had drawn the same conclusions. It's like with a fire, to use such an analogy. It also requires Oxygen from the air and material to burn so you need to contain it or it will run, well actually literally burn, wherever there is material/oxygen, and in this case being humans/and or even animals.

I wouldn't be suprised if they issue Martial Law of some kind for the whole country of Angola and do so very soon. Especially if Marburg doesn't appear to be burning itself out anytime soon.

Does anyone else find it "strange" that the first case of marburg was in Germany at a very high level bio-research lab, then how many years later it shows up back in africa? More deadly and infectious than ever?

Cooincidence? or "testing"?

Originally posted by DrHoracid
Does anyone else find it "strange" that the first case of marburg was in Germany at a very high level bio-research lab, then how many years later it shows up back in africa? More deadly and infectious than ever?

Cooincidence? or "testing"?

I know, and this is keeping with the main topic question: Where did it come from?

...I heard that it was discovered in a Bio-Lab in Germany, back in 1967? Lab workers becoming infected from samples taken from Green Monkeys?

So why did it lay dormant for 37 years and then surface again, this time back in Africa? I suppose that's where the -green monkeys- originated from, am I right on this?

It's no wonder that the people of Angola are panicking, when nearly all the cases of infection being with the young and in health workers are almost all FATAL. I wouldn't want to go to a quarantine lab/hospital knowing that I'm just gonna die either. But then again, would I want others to become infected because of my ignorant actions?

Tough decisions

Any other opinions, or factual info out there?

Are we seeing a bug that is recycling itself in a natural way? Or is this a testing ground for future bio-warfare?

l

w1kdtr1p

go back and read my posts from the CDC website.........it gives you the history of marburg..............

it will help you some.

not saying that is the COMPLETE story...........but its the version that is most widely known......AKA the GVMT version!


angie