Rwanda has banned anyone who has been exposed to Marburg virus from leaving the country as it seeks to stop the outbreak spreading beyond its borders.
Anyone wishing to travel abroad from Rwanda must complete a questionnaire to report any potential symptoms within 24 hours of their departure, the Rwandan Ministry of Health said on Wednesday.
“If you’ve been in contact with a confirmed case of Marburg, you cannot travel until 21 days after your exposure provided you are symptom-free,” it said in an announcement.
The incubation period for Marburg, a hemorrhagic fever from the same family as Ebola, varies from between two and 21 days, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
Marburg has a fatality rate of up to 88 per cent and spreads through direct contact with the bodily fluids of the infected.
Symptoms include fever and muscle aches and can progress to vomiting blood and internal bleeding, which can be fatal in severe cases.
Rwanda has been battling an outbreak of Marburg since late September centred around a major health facility in the capital, Kigali.
Thirteen people have now died out of a total of 58 cases of the virus reported since the outbreak began. Most of those infected have been health workers, particularly those working in intensive care units.
Protect those ‘who protect us’
Health officials in the United States on Wednesday announced they would begin screening travellers arriving from Rwanda for the virus.
The US Centres of Disease Control (CDC) had already issued a travel notice urging those planning to visit the country to reconsider nonessential travel.
But the notice prompted an angry response from Dr Jean Kaseya, the Director General of Africa CDC.
“The decision is unfair especially for a country that is doing all that can be done to stop the disease,” he said at the opening of a business summit in Kigali.
The first doses of an experimental vaccine against Marburg were given to frontline health workers as part of a clinical trial.
Some 700 shots of the single-dose vaccine, designed at the US National Institutes of Health and developed by the Sabin Vaccine Institute, were delivered to Rwanda last week and another 1,000 doses are on the way.
Rwanda’s King Faisal Hospital on Tuesday said it had begun vaccinating health workers there.
“Protecting those who protect us is key to ensuring the health and safety of all,” it said.
Rwanda’s healthcare system is considered much stronger than those of its neighbours, but it has never experienced an outbreak of Marburg before.
An outbreak in Angola in 2005 killed more than 300 people.
The virus was first identified in 1967, when 31 people were infected in the German cities of Marburg and Frankfurt and in Belgrade in Serbia. Seven people died in the simultaneous outbreaks, which were eventually traced back to a shipment of African green monkeys from Uganda.
Most human cases of Marburg since then have been caused by prolonged exposure to bat colonies living in caves and mines.
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