Battered by nearly three decades of civil war, Angola’s hospitals could become a breeding ground for the Marburg virus which has already killed more than 200 people, the country’s deputy health minister warned.

Protection measures in hospitals, especially in northern Uige province - the epicentre of the world’s worst-known Marbug outbreak - must be improved to ensure the virus does not spread into the very clinics that should be helping patients, Deputy Health Minister Jose Van Dunem said late on Tuesday.

“Technically we can’t exclude this possibility because there are a lot of (health) professionals that have died from the disease. We must manage this ... in order to cut the transmission chain,” Van Dunem told Reuters in an interview.

At least 14 of the 210 people known to have died of the disease - a haemorrhagic fever transmitted through bodily fluids including saliva and blood - have been health professionals.

A further 21 people diagnosed with Marburg are still alive, but their chances of survival are slim.

Van Dunem said the overall situation was looking better, but it was too early to describe the outbreak as under control.

“We can say that the situation is under control if we stop the deaths. Unfortunately this is not the case. We are reinforcing measures, but there are still people dying.”

HEALTH WORKERS WORRIED

He said the civil war that stretched for 27 years until April 2002 had devastated Angola’s health sector, and Uige was especially hard-hit.

“Uige is a very special situation. It is a province that has suffered too much with the war,” he said.

“The public network is destroyed. It is a province in which you don’t have a lot of technicians, medical doctors, well-trained nurses, so it has reflected in the quality of the services we offer,” he added.

Health workers have said they feel inadequately protected from the killer bug, whose symptoms include headaches, internal bleeding, nausea, vomiting and bloody diarrhoea.

The outbreak of Marburg, related to the Ebola virus, is the worst on record. The previous worst was a 1998-2000 epidemic in the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo, when 123 people died.

Van Dunem said while protection measures for staff working in the medical sector should be improved, the hospital in Uige would not be closed as medical organisation Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) had earlier recommended.

“To cut the possibility of getting the disease in hospitals, (we must) improve the measures of self-protection, bio-security measures. It doesn’t make sense to close the hospital, it’s a hospital of 360 beds,” he said.