Congo health and border officials are setting up inspection points to try to prevent an outbreak of a killer hemorrhagic fever spreading from Angola, Health Minister Emile Bongeli said Tuesday, adding he did not rule out closing the border. «We will take all necessary measures to protect the country,» Bongeli told a news conference. «The closure of the border has not been excluded, it's not inconceivable.» But it was difficult to imagine how authorities could seal off the 1,750-kilometer (1,050-mile) frontier with Angola that's heavily traversed and easily crossed. Bongeli said he visited the border region Monday to oversee the placement of reinforced surveillance teams, including experts in hemorrhagic fevers and epidemics who were joined Tuesday by a five-member team from the U.N. World Health Organization. The teams are equipped to test for the Marburg virus, so that suspect cases can be quickly identified, according to Dr. Muyembe Tamfum, medical director of Congo's National Institute for Biomedical Research. The outbreak in Angola, identified last week as the rare Marburg virus, has killed 117 people and infected another seven, Angola's Health Ministry said Tuesday. It threatens to overtake the worst outbreak on record, which killed 123 in the Congo in 1998. There is no vaccine or treatment for the disease. «We are in the process of installing a quarantine line ... because, even though there is as yet no sign or confirmed case of the malady among us, we are living under a direct threat,» Bongeli said. The neighboring Republic of Congo has expressed similar fears, and its top health official, Dr. Damase Bozongo, said Monday he did not understand why Angolan officials have not quarantined the affected area. He said his country was trying to curtail border traffic and had strengthened monitoring and inspections in hopes of catching any suspect cases. --SP 2338 Local Time 2038 GMT
