Pygmy Populations Seronegative for Marburg Virus

摘要

To the Editor: A serosurvey wasconducted in Durba, a mining villagenear Watsa, northeastern DemocraticRepublic of Congo, the epicenter ofMarburg hemorrhagic fever (MHF)outbreaks in 1994 and 1998–2000(1–3). In this survey, Bausch et al.found a prevalence of anti-Marburgimmunoglobulin (Ig) G of 0.35% (2of 565) in the nonmining population,but a prevalence of 3.75% (13 of 347)in miners. Mine work was an inde-pendent risk factor for seropositivityfor anti-Marburg IgG (1). Given thatwidespread secondary transmissioncould not be documented in theseropositive miners, primary trans-mission from the unknown reservoirlikely occurred in the mines whererodent, shrew, bat, and other faunawere abundant. No evidence ofMarburg virus (MBGV) infection wasfound in samples from small mam-mals, amphibians, and arthropods col-lected in and around Gorumbwa mine(R. Swanepoel, pers. comm.); the ori-gin of the MHF outbreak remainedunknown.We hypothesized that the MBGVreservoir's habitat might not be limit-ed to gold mines around Durba, butmay exist in caves or forests in thewider Watsa area. As hunter-gather-ers, pygmies enter caves for shelterand are in frequent contact with wildanimals and body fluids of butcheredgame. Earlier studies found that pyg-mies were seropositive for filovirusessignificantly more often than subsis-tence farmers (for filoviruses [4,5],for Ebola but not Marburg [6]). Weconducted a seroprevalence study toverify whether pygmies living in theWatsa area constitute another popula-tion at risk for primary transmissionof MBGV