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Joan Stephenson, PhD

JAMA. 2005;293:2333.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 126 words of the full text and any section headings.

After 6 months, a deadly outbreak of Marburg hemorrhagic fever in Angola that began in October 2004 appeared to be on the wane. By late April, reported World Health Organization (WHO) officials, the average number of cases had declined from about 35 per week to 15 per week.

According to Angola’s Ministry of Health, 266 cases of the rare disease had been identified as of April 20, 244 of them fatal—the largest and deadliest Marburg outbreak on record, with a case-fatality rate greater than 90%. Controlling the problem had been hindered by affected populations’ extreme anxiety about the disease and suspicions about the safety of hospitals, leading communities to hide cases and bodies.

Updates about the outbreak are available online at http://www.who.int/csr/don/archive/disease/marburg_virus_disease/en/index.html.