There were two patients of Marburg virus in the last seven days when the Ministry of Health announced their new plan to give an update of the pandemic on a weekly basis, rather than daily basis.
All the patients have recovered, no new fatality, no new infection, no new case under isolation.
“All remaining cases have recovered. The outbreak is under control and surveillance continues,” writes the Ministry of health on twitter handle, November 8.
The Minister of Health Dr. Nsanzimana Sabin gave an even more inclusive summary where he noted that there was new case for the past 9 days, no new death for the past 3 weeks and no patient in treatment.
“The countdown starts now! We remain vigilant,” Nsanzimana concluded.
The Marburg Virus outbreak was confirmed in Rwanda on September 27 and ever since, the country embraced serious measures to counter more spread of the disease.
Measures consisted on a campaign that invited people to avoid close contact with symptomatic people, enhance hygiene, avoid handshakes and close greetings.
The country also started to vaccinate frontline workers like medical practitioners, and so far, 1710 people have been vaccinated.
In this audio interview conducted on October 30, 2024, Minister Nsanzimana told the England New Journal of Medicine that the Marburg Virus was in the past confirmed in the neighboring Tanzania, adding that it is the first time it was confirmed in Rwanda.
He said at first, it was difficult to identify the source of the virus when they saw some symptoms from a medical practitioner of University teaching hospital.
“That’s actually the time when we started investigating what pathogen we were dealing with,” he said.
“We never thought a Marburg virus would be the first one to think about because this had never happened before. We started bring out most present pathogen and clinical presentations of the Marburg was very close to diseases like Malaria and others, We were also obliged to test other symptoms like fever virus and the Marburg virus got to be confirmed after a series of testing,” Minister Nsanzimana said.
At this level, the Minister said, they started testing people and other response steps.
Nsanzimana said, that by putting together patients files, they managed to trace the origin of the infection to be associated with a bat from a cave. And from the previous sequences, they understood that the virus did not change that much because in previous tests, Marburg virus was also found to have been hosted by the same bat.
“This proved us that actually the host of the virus did not change,” Minister Nsanzimana said. “We understood that this virus directly jumped from animal(foot bat) to human.”
