International health specialists battling an outbreak of Marburg virus in Angola suspect unorthodox medical practices by local traditional healers may be contributing to the spread of the deadly disease. The experts suggest that the healers, who lack medical training and supplies but substitute for doctors in many rural African communities, are administering injections in homes or in makeshift clinics with reused needles or syringes. | This is a captial way to spread HIV and hepatitis B, of course. Some reports suggest that the re-use of needles, scalpel blades and syringes is the #2 spreader of HIV in Africa. Uganda saw its HIV infection rate decrease, in part, because of aid that provided enough one-time use medical supplies that re-use was no longer needed. |
Dr. Pierre Formenty, an expert in hemorrhagic fevers like Marburg and a member of the World Health Organization's team in Uige, said Saturday that unsafe injections could explain why an average of three people per day continued to die of the Marburg virus a full month after the outbreak was identified and international teams arrived in Angola to battle it.
Although it is not clear what solutions the healers are injecting, specialists said, the virus can easily be transmitted from an infected to an uninfected person through a contaminated needle or syringe. "I would say it is bit bizarre that we still have these high numbers per week," Formenty said in a telephone interview.
He said medical workers had developed a campaign against injections at home "asking people to use other kinds of medicines or to come to hospital or the health center to have a safe injection with new devices." Another health care worker, who spoke on condition of anonymity, insisted that unnecessary shots are common in the province, saying, "There is a notion in Africa that if you haven't been given an injection, you haven't been treated."
There is more than a whiff of political correctness and UN inaction about this. An expert in Marburg transmission would have known something that I found out in 10 minutes using google, namely that injections with tainted needles was an important source of infection in the previous largest outbreak. Yet for the last month WHO has been saying it's being spread by close contact with an infected person. They could have tracked down these 'healers' a month ago and saved scores of lives. And this may yet run out of control and we will have the WHO to thank for however many it kills.