Mysterious Viruses as Bad as They Get

NY Times: "UÍGE, Angola, April 19 - Traditional healers here say their grandmothers knew of a bleeding disease similar to the current epidemic of hemorrhagic fever that has killed 244 of the 266 people who have contracted it. The grandmothers even had a treatment for the sickness, the healers told Dr. Boris I. Pavlin of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But the remedy has been lost. The old disease was called kifumbe, the word in the Kikongo language for murder. But kifumbe did not seem to be contagious. And so, Dr. Pavlin said, though he did not doubt it was real, it was probably not the same as the disease in Uíge today. The current disease, caused by the Marburg virus, is contagious. Like the Ebola virus, to which it is closely related, it is spread by bodily fluids like blood, vomit and saliva. No one can say for sure what kifumbe (pronounced key-FOOM-bay) was, and in some ways the Marburg virus is almost as mysterious. More than a month has passed since it was identified as the cause of the deadly outbreak here - the largest Marburg epidemic on record - but some of the most basic questions about the epidemic have yet to be answered. How and when did this rare virus get here? Why have so many victims been children? And how could so many have become infected before the disease was recognized?"