A MYSTERIOUS ‘nosebleed’ disease has claimed the lives of three people in Burundi, west Africa.
All those who died in the landlocked country passed away within 24 hours of showing symptoms, local media website SOS Media Burundi reports.
Getty – ContributorHealth authorities scrambling to contain the virus have quarantined the area of Baziro[/caption]
Symptoms of the illness include fever, headaches, vomiting, abdominal pain, dizziness and nosebleeds.
Health authorities scrambling to contain the virus have quarantined the area of Baziro – where two of the infected people were moved to and treated.
“It’s a disease that kills quickly,” a panicked nurse from the Migwa health centre told the news site. “It’s terrible, we are all waiting for death.”
It’s understood she was working at a health care centre that received two of the patients before they died.
The symptoms may point towards some sort of viral haemorrhagic fever, which damages the walls of tiny blood vessels making them leak, such as Marburg and Ebola.
However the Burundian Ministry of Health has already ruled out both illnesses, according to the news site.
The announcement comes soon after neighbouring country Tanzania announced an outbreak of Margburg for the first time, in which eight people developed symptoms and five died.
All cases were discovered in the north west of Tanzania, which directly borders Burundi.
Last week, Equatorial Guinea, in west Africa, confirmed eight additional cases of the highly virulent bug after announcing it’s first ever outbreak in February.
The World Health Organisation said the new cases were spread across three different provinces over a range of nearly 100 miles “suggesting wider transmission of the virus”.
The cases were found in provinces bordering neighbouring countries, meaning that “the risk of international spread cannot be ruled out”, a statement said.
Last July, a team of doctors and health experts were dispatched to investigate a mysterious ‘nosebleed’ disease in southern Tanzania that claimed the lives of three people.
The country’s chief medical officer Aifello Sichalwe said in a statement that all patients had tested negative for similar viruses Ebola and Marburg, as well as Covid.
Tanzania’s President Samia Suluhu Hassan said on Tuesday the “strange” disease reported in Lindi may have been caused by “growing interaction” between humans and wild animals.
If the virus has jumped from an animal to humans, that would make it a zoonotic disease.
WHO has warned that zoonotic diseases are becoming a growing problem in Africa.