Fear stalked the streets on Saturday in this squalid northern Angolan town devastated by years of civil war, now the epicenter of an outbreak of the killer Marburg virus which has claimed 180 lives so far.
In Uige Province alone, some 160 people have been killed by the virus which has claimed 98 percent of those infected in the outbreak, described by the UN as "the worst ever" and "not yet under control."
In Uige town, where fierce fighting between government and rebel troops in Angola's civil war raged until about two years ago, health workers dressed in head-to-toe "Ebola suits" were on their way to pick up a man dying from haemorrhagic fever, as residents struggled to continue with their daily lives under the constant threat of death.
PHOTO: AFP
"We are afraid here all the time," said Octavio Vicente, 25, a Uige resident who works for the UN's World Food Program.
"People are scared here. They are scared to go to the hospital, because that is where everybody got sick," he said at the town's small and run-down airport, which still bears pock-marked bullet holes from the war.
The Ebola-like Marburg virus, whose exact origin is unknown, spreads through contact with bodily fluids such as blood, excrement, vomit, saliva, sweat and tears, but can be contained with relatively simple health precautions, according to experts.
The oubreak has spread to seven of Angola's 18 provinces, and has overtaken an earlier Marburg outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo as the largest ever recorded. It was first detected in 1967 when German laboratory workers in Marburg were infected by monkeys from Uganda.
Health workers battling the disease say they have met with heavy resistance from some local communities in Uige.
Normally, custom here dictates that families spend a lot of time with the bodies of the dead before they dispose of the corpse. But that is when the virus is most virulent.
"You can imagine a team coming, taking a child away to the hospital and three days later the family learns that the child is already dead and buried," said Alain Epelboin, French anthropologist of the Paris-based National Center for Scientific Research.
Amada Pedro, 23, a Uige resident, said: "The people say the sick are not animals to be buried like this. The population is revolted and are throwing stones at the teams who are going to pick up the corpses."
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
RSS