Virus

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LUANDA (Reuters) - Fear and ignorance are fueling the world's deadliest outbreak of Marburg fever in Angola, where locals are too suspicious of medics in "astronaut" suits to let them take away infected loved ones, aid workers said on Monday.

Terrified residents stoned World Health Organization (WHO) workers' vehicles late last week, putting a brief halt to their operations to contain the disease in Uige province, northeast of Angola's capital Luanda.

"We no longer have people coming to the isolation ward -- people are hiding their patients at home because they're scared. That means the virus keeps on spreading in the community," Monica Castellarnau, emergency coordinator for Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) in Uige, told Reuters by phone from Uige.

The outbreak has killed 192 of the 213 known cases.

Marburg is a hemmoragic fever similar to Ebola. It's the same family of virus.

The mortality rate from Ebola infections is about 90-95% and for Marburg it's about 80%. There is no treatment and there is no cure. Some scientists believe the emergence of hemmoragic fever in the latter half of the 20th century could be attributed to deforestation as populations became exposed to virus pools.

The only thing that has prevented Ebola or Marburg from basically wiping out extremely large populations is that it has a very short incubation period. It's about 10 days from exposure until the person dies by bleeding to death from every orifice in their body. The virus basically destroys soft tissue to the point that the blood pressure in the body bursts the tissue and the victim bleeds out.

The virus is transmitted by contact with bodily fluids and can be airborne. If you sit on an airplane next to someone with the virus and they sneeze on you, you could be dead within a week.

It's quite nasty.