Marburg

Uganda's latest Ebola outbreak, which I covered back in July, was just officially declared over on October 5th, a mere two weeks ago. Now today there is a report that three are dead from an outbreak of Marburg virus. That makes 4 Ebola outbreaks and now 2 Marburg outbreaks in the country since 2000.
As I've noted before, filoviruses are some of my favorite pathogens. I don't work on them myself--though in the pre-children era I certainly thought about it--but I find them absolutely fascinating to read about and follow the literature. Mostly, I think, this is because after knowing about them for so many years (Marburg was discovered in 1967), and so much research (over 1500 papers in Pubmed, or roughly a paper for every person these viruses have killed), we still know relatively little about the most basic questions--such as where there viruses are maintained in nature, and how they…