The outbreak of Marburg, an Ebola-like hemorrhagic fever, has killed 253 people out of 273 infected in Angola, the Health Ministry said on Wednesday.

The ministry said that one more death and three new suspected cases of Marburg hemorrhagic fever were reported on Wednesday.

The epidemic, which broke out in October but was only confirmed in March, has been largely limited to the northwestern province of Uige, about 300 km north of the capital Luanda.

Experts from the WHO and the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as well as groups like the nonprofit Medecins Sans Frontieres, are working to help contain the deadly virus.

The Angolan Ministry of Health and the World Health Organization said last weekend that medical teams were beginning to get the outbreak under control, as cooperation with stricken communities improves. The number of new cases has dropped from an average of 35 per week to 15.

The Marburg virus can kill a healthy person in a week by diarrhea and vomiting followed by severe internal bleeding, and is not treatable with any known drugs.

In the last known outbreak of Marburg, 123 people were killed in the neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo between 1998 and 2000.

(Xinhua News Agency April 28, 2005)