Mystery Disease Kills 56 in Angola in Two Weeks

Posted on March 16, 2005

The ProMed email service, a program of the International Society for Infectious Diseases, had an email post that 56 people have died in Angola in the last two weeks from an unknown illness. A post on ProMed said that the illness, called gastric hemorrhage by local doctors, "begins with fever symptoms for 2 days and then the patient begins to cough up blood, falls into a coma, and dies within 4 days." 2 of victims were nurses in the regional Huige province hospital. If your thinking this might be ebola or another hemorrhagic fever the ProMED moderator had this to say:

As a geographical reminder, while the viral hemorrhagic fevers such as Ebola, Lassa & Marburg have not been reported from Angola, Lassa fever is endemic in West Africa to the north of Angola, Ebola has recurrently appeared in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Republic of the Congo to the north of Angola, and Marburg was reported in backpackers travelling through Zimbabwe to the southeast of Angola.

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