What Experts Want You to Know About the ‘Bleeding Eye’ Virus Outbreak
“Bleeding eye” virus, also known as the Marburg virus, is circulating in Rwanda.
The U.S. State Department and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are warning about traveling to certain regions due to the outbreak.
Marburg virus has a high mortality rate.
As COVID-19 and flu season ramp up, another virus is making headlines: “Bleeding eyes” virus, also known as the Marburg virus.
The U.S. State Department is warning Americans against traveling to Rwanda due to an outbreak. So far, 15 people have died from the disease.
A travel alert from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) urges people to “practice enhanced precautions” if traveling to Rwanda, noting that Marburg virus disease is “rare and deadly.”
It’s caused by infection with marburgviruses, which are naturally found in the Egyptian rousette bat, according to the CDC. “It can spread from bats to people, and then you can have human-to-human spread,” says Thomas Russo, M.D., professor and chief of infectious disease at the University at Buffalo in New York. The virus spreads between humans through exposure to blood and bodily fluids, says infectious disease expert Amesh A. Adalja, M.D., senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
While Marburg virus isn’t well-known to most Americans, Dr. Russo points out that it’s a “cousin of Ebola.”
Marburg virus is most commonly found in sub-Saharan Africa, per the CDC. It’s named for the German city where scientists became sick with the disease’s first known cases in 1967 while they were handling monkeys imported from Africa.
(West Germany) in 1967.
