Virus outbreak contained in Uganda

An outbreak of a deadly Ebola-like disease at a mine in western Uganda has been contained, health officials said Thursday.

The Marburg virus, a rare hemorrhagic illness, killed a 29-year-old last month. The country had not seen a Marburg outbreak for 30 years.

Health Minister Dr. Stephen Mallinga said the 21-day maximum incubation period has passed with no new cases reported.

"Theoretically the transmission chain has been broken, the transmission has been stopped and the outbreak contained," he said.

The disease has a death rate that can be higher than 90 percent and no treatment or vaccine. Marburg can cause headaches, nausea, diarrhea and vomiting. In severe cases, the central nervous system is attacked, and patients may bleed from the eyes, ears and elsewhere.

Since Marburg was first identified in 1967, large outbreaks have been reported in Congo, Angola and elsewhere.

Virus hunters swathed in protective gear plan to enter the lead and gold mine in Uganda to search for bats they believe may be the source of the latest outbreak. The medical investigators will take blood samples to look for antibodies of the Marburg virus, before killing the animals and removing their livers and spleens.

Scientists are not sure how the virus is transmitted to humans, but believe people may become infected by being bitten by bats or by insects or other animals that have been infected by bats. Another possibility is that people catch it by breathing in air carrying virus particles from bat feces.

http://educate-yourself.org/vcd/vcshepbvaccineoriginofhivaids18jul02.shtml

Dr. Maurice Hilleman, considered the world¹s leading vaccine developer, admitted during a 1986 interview (that never aired, the tape of which I recovered from the audio archives of the National Library of Medicine), that he imported the AIDS-virus into North America in contaminated monkeys destined for vaccine research and development at the Merck Pharmaceutical Company. He described how he brought the non-human primates into New York from Africa and got them off the planes. Recovered contracts show that Litton Bionetics¹s monkey colonies, as the NCI monograph depicts, were in southeast Uganda, and in northwest Uganda. Litton affiliated there, at that time, with the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) that conducted numerous cancer virus and vaccine studies on native populations.

The early HB vaccines were prepared in these contaminated chimpanzees. The viruses were grown in the chimps, and then extracted along with a variety of simian virus contaminants (including SV40, SIVs, and SFRs) during the vaccine manufacturing process. The viruses were then injected into the Willowbrook children, gay men, and Black Africans. Of course, many of these people died during this part of the investigation. The survivors, who had developed (HB) antibodies, then contributed their blood. The final vaccine was prepared from this blood by separating the whole cells from the serum. It was from this (pooled) serum that four different sub-types of the 1974-75 HB vaccine were prepared and administered. The 200,000 doses were reportedly tested on these same populations.

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