Killer on the Loose

At the border between Kenya and the Sudan, soldiers with submachine guns halt all traffic, including nomadic herdsmen who usually cross at will with their goats and sheep. In neighboring Zaire, alarmed officials seal off part of their northern frontier. At airports in Africa and Europe, passengers suddenly find themselves subjected to unusual scrutiny and occasional detention. These grim security measures are aimed not at halting some new eruption of guerrilla terror but at containing a possibly greater menace: a killer fever that has been spreading ominously in equatorial Africa, causing as many as 300 fatalities, including the deaths of four Belgian medical missionaries.

Initially, some doctors thought the ailment was a form of Lassa fever, a highly lethal and still untreatable viral disease, usually transmitted by rodents, which was first discovered in a Nigerian town in 1969. Now the mystery has been solved. In Geneva last week, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced that scientists at Atlanta's CDC, Antwerp's Institute for Tropical Medicine and Britain's Microbiological Research Establishment had all identified the killer as a form of Marburg virus disease, an extremely rare ailment first spotted in 1967 among lab workers in Marburg, West Germany, handling organs of African green monkeys. Seven of more than two dozen technicians infected died of the disease. In 1975 there were three more cases in South Africa, one of them fatal.

Similar Affliction. The first deaths in the latest outbreak occurred last month in the remote southern Sudanese shantytown of Maridi. Doctors at a clinic there radioed that 46 people had died, including a physician and several nurses. Since then, reports from neighboring Zaire indicate that at least 200 people have died of a similar affliction. In both regions the victims first suffered severe headaches and high fever. Within days they were coughing, vomiting and hemorrhaging, and a third to a half of all those hospitalized later died.

Like Lassa fever, Marburg virus disease is highly infectious. Though scientists still do not know the exact mechanism, the disease can be transmitted by contact with infected blood, tissue and even semen; it may also be spread by particles in the air. No cure has yet been found, although doctors are hoping a serum can be made from blood of surviving victims who have antibodies against the virus.

To combat the disease, health officials in Africa are relying on the only weapon they now have: strict isolation of every infected area.

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