An outbreak of what appears to be a new haemorrhagic fever has brought home how frightening little we know about deadly African viruses. Three people have died and a fourth was ill as 91av went to press.
In early September a 36-year-old woman living near Lusaka in Zambia fell ill and was airlifted to South Africa, where she died. Alarms were raised when a paramedic and a nurse who tended her died two weeks later. The latest person to succumb is a nurse who tended the paramedic.
On Sunday, South Africa’s (NICD) announced that the culprit was an arenavirus, a family of viruses carried by rodents. While several arenaviruses, including Sin Nombre, cause haemorrhagic fevers in the Americas, there was thought to be only one in Africa: , which kills around 5000 people a year in West Africa. “Now suddenly there’s this,” says Bob Swanepoel of the NICD, an expert on haemorrhagic viruses including the infamous Ebola and Marburg, which belong to the filovirus family.
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The US Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, is sequencing the Zambian virus to see how it is related to other arenaviruses and whether it is a new strain or one so far unidentified. “It’s shocking how little we know about the viruses circulating in Africa,” says Swanepoel.
In Africa, arenaviruses are carried by a common farm pest, the (below).
