Walsh & Hoyt: Filoviridae

Filoviruses (from the Latin filo, meaning ""filament"") are rarely encountered and little is known about their natural history. These agents cause a severe, unrelenting viral hemorrhagic fever (VHF) with a high mortality. Marburg virus was the first of the Filoviridae to be isolated during an investigation of a new and fulminating febrile disease in Europe in 1967 (primarily in Marburg, Germany). Those affected were laboratory workers who were preparing kidney cell cultures from imported green monkeys from Uganda. Nearly a decade later, outbreaks of a highly lethal hemorrhagic fever occurred in Zaire and in the Sudan caused by Ebola virus infection. In 1994, a single case of nonfatal human infection caused by a newly described Ebola virus strain acquired during autopsy of a wild chimpanzee occurred in Cote dIvoire. In May 1995, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia, was notified by health authorities at the United States Embassy in Zaire of an outbreak of VHF due to Ebola virus in the city of Kikwit and the surrounding Bandundu region of Zaire. This epidemic had a fatality rate greater than 90% and generated tremendous attention in the lay press.