Marburg virus disease which was confirmed for the first time in Rwanda on September 27 is named after a German city which was among the first to get such an outbreak.

As of Wednesday, October 2, the Ministry of Health had confirmed 36 cases, and hundreds of contacts of the infected are being monitored. The death toll from the haemorrhagic disease was 11.

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In this article, The New Times looks at the disease’s early origin, how it got its name from, and its nature.

The name

The Marburg virus gets its name from the German city of Marburg, one of the three locations in Europe where, in 1967, several workers involved in polio vaccine development and production fell ill with a severe and often lethal novel disease.

The disease was also simultaneously detected in Frankfurt in Germany and in Belgrade, Serbia in the same year.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), Marburg virus disease is in the same family of haemorrhagic fevers as the virus that causes Ebola virus disease.

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The origins

The 1967 outbreaks in Marburg and Frankfurt in Germany as well as in Belgrade, Serbia were associated with laboratory work using African green monkeys imported from Uganda.

Outbreaks and sporadic cases have since been reported in Angola, DR Congo, Kenya, South Africa, and Uganda, the USA, Tanzania and beyond.

The disease can be caused by two distinct viruses belonging to the species Marburg marburgvirus (genus Marburgvirus, mononegavirales family Filoviridae): Marburg virus (MARV) and Ravn virus (RAVV).

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Both stains appear to be maintained in nature by sub-clinically infected Egyptian rousettes (cave-dwelling frugivorous bats of the pteropodine species Rousettus aegyptiacus Gray) roosting in Africa.

The transmission pathway from bats to humans is unclear, according to scientists, but most Marburg virus disease outbreaks were epidemiologically associated with natural or artificial caves located in arid woodlands, suggesting that infections occur within caves after contact with, for instance, bat excretions or secretions.

Diagnosis

According to the WHO, it can be difficult to clinically distinguish Marburg virus disease from other infectious diseases such as malaria, typhoid fever, shigellosis, meningitis and other viral haemorrhagic fevers.

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Confirmation that symptoms are caused by Marburg virus infection are made using diagnostic methods including antibody-capture enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA), antigen-capture detection tests, serum neutralization test, reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) assay, electron microscopy, and virus isolation by cell culture.

Marburg virus in animals

Rousettus aegyptiacus bats are considered natural hosts of the Marburg virus. There is no apparent disease in the fruit bats. As a result, the geographic distribution of Marburg virus may overlap with the range of Rousettus bats.

Experimental inoculations in pigs with different Ebola viruses have been reported and show that pigs are susceptible to filovirus infection and shed the virus.