Ugandan health officials on 1 August issued an alert after three suspected cases of Marburg haemorrhagic fever were reported in a remote district near the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo.
 
Preliminary medical tests on two of the cases suggested they had contracted the deadly disease, officials said. One of them died in Kamwenge District, western Uganda.

"A national task force has been set up, tracing all potential contacts of the cases for further investigations and tests," the Ministry of Health said in a statement.
 
Sam Okware, Commissioner of Health Services, told IRIN that medical teams were being dispatched to areas where there could be people exposed to the possible outbreak.

Another health ministry official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said: "One team is going to Kamwenge, another will go to Mityana and a third to Kayunga [both districts in the central region] where the contacts are reported to have gone."

Marburg fever is a rare, severe type of haemorrhagic (internal bleeding) fever, which affects both humans and monkeys.
 
Caused by a genetically unique animal-borne virus, its recognition led to the creation of the 'filovirus' virus family, of which the four species of Ebola are the only other known members.
 
The virus was first recorded in 1967, when outbreaks of haemorrhagic fever occurred simultaneously in laboratories in Marburg and Frankfurt (Germany) and in Belgrade (the former Yugoslavia, now Serbia).
 
A total of 37 people became ill. They included laboratory workers, medical personnel and relatives who had cared for them. The first people infected had been exposed to African green monkeys. In Marburg, the monkeys had been imported for research and to prepare a polio vaccine.
 
Over time, recorded cases have appeared in only a few locations. In 1975, a traveller, most likely exposed in Zimbabwe, became ill in Johannesburg, South Africa, and passed the virus to his companion and a nurse. In 1980 there were two other cases, including one in Western Kenya, not far from the Ugandan source of the monkeys involved in the 1967 outbreak. In 2005, there was an outbreak in Uige, Angola.
 
The disease is highly contagious, similar to Ebola and characterised by high fever, possible liver failure and death within a few days. In 2000, a devastating Ebola epidemic hit northern Uganda, killing 170 of the 428 infected.

In its statement, the health ministry warned Ugandans not to panic.