Filoviruses

Excerpt

Filoviruses were first discovered in 1967 as the causative agents of a hemorrhagic fever outbreak among laboratory workers in Europe. These workers had been exposed to tissues and blood from African green monkeys (Cercopithecus aethiops) imported from Uganda and infected with Marburg virus. Since then, sporadic cases of Marburg hemorrhagic fever in man have occurred in Kenya and Zimbabwe (Table 72-1).

Ebola hemorrhagic fever was first reported from northern Zaire and southern Sudan in 1976 when two distinct subtypes were isolated during simultaneous epidemics. Ebola Sudan reemerged in 1979 at the same location, causing a smaller epidemic of viral hemorrhagic fever. The third subtype (Reston) was isolated from cynomolgus monkeys (Macaca fascicularis) imported from the Philippines into the United States in 1989 and into Italy in 1992. Another distinct Ebola virus emerged on the Ivory Coast in 1994. The virus was isolated from a nonfatal case, in which a worker was infected during the autopsy of a wild chimpanzee. Recently Ebola reemerged in southwestern Zaire in the city of Kikwit and the surrounding villages in Bandundu Province. The isolated virus was closely related to the 1976 Zairian isolate, and the outbreak in these regions resembled the previous Ebola hemorrhagic fever epidemics (Table 72-1).