The disease, known as Marburg virus disease (MVD), is similar to Ebola and can be lethal in up to 90 per cent of cases.
Emergency screening has begun at the Kenya-Uganda border in Turkana after three members of the same family died of the disease in Uganda.
The outbreak is thought to have started in September when a man in his 30s, who worked as a game hunter and lived near a cave with a heavy presence of bats, was admitted to a local health centre with a high fever, vomiting and diarrhoea.
He did not respond to antimalarial treatment and his condition rapidly deteriorated.
He was quickly taken to another hospital in the neighbouring district, but died shortly after arriving.
His sister, in her 50s, died shortly afterwards and a third victim passed away in the treatment unit of a local health centre…
Several hundred people are believed to have been exposed to the virus, which is among the most virulent pathogens known to infect humans.
To be the big one, there can be no antibiotics or vaccine. It should be airborne, be transmissible while not symptomatic, and ideally able to survive outside the body for an extended period on surfaces, though that is not required. Flu viruses only last about 24 hours on a hard surface. Meaning that an office filled with flu victims that is left empty for a weekend will be sterile of flu by Monday morning, and yet the 1918 pandemic was still devastating. Still it was not as devastating as it would have been had the virus been able to survive for weeks on a surface, like Norovirus, or even the 4-5 days Marburg can last.
This is not airborne though, and unless you are talking about survivors, infectors tend to be visibly sick. But all of that can change, when you are dealing with the living organism.
Marburg has been documented to be sexually transmitted for up to seven weeks post-infection however, and there have been spontaneous re-emergences post infection, so again, we wait with bated breath to see if it can make it into the homosexual community, where it will rapidly spread throughout the general rabbit population.
Maybe it is me, but I do not recall hearing about these outbreaks with this frequency through the eighties, nineties, and aughts. Now it seems every few months a hemorrhagic fever or other pandemic is breaking out. All it would take is one, and we might avert an outright Apocalypse as in the Renaissance. As bleak as things look sometimes, there is no guarantee that what is coming must be awful for the K-strategists.
Only time will tell.