Forty-Five Years of Marburg Virus Research

Brauburger, Kristina; Hume, Adam J.; Mühlberger, Elke; Olejnik, Judith

Marburg virus (MARV) first appeared in August 1967, when laboratory workers in Marburg and Frankfurt, Germany and Belgrade, Yugoslavia (now Serbia) were infected with a previously unknown infectious agent. The 31 patients (25 primary, six secondary infections) developed severe disease that progressed to a fatal outcome in seven of the cases. An additional case showing symptoms of disease was diagnosed retrospectively (reviewed in [1] ). The source of infection was traced back to African green monkeys (Chlorocebus aethiops) that had been imported from Uganda and were shipped to all three locations. The primary infections ironically occurred when the monkeys were necropsied for the purpose of obtaining kidney cells to culture poliomyelitis vaccine strains. In the remarkable period of less than three months the etiologic agent was isolated, characterized, and identified by the joint effort OPEN ACCESS of scientists in Marburg and Hamburg [2] and was later confirmed by Kunz and colleagues [3] and Kissling and colleagues [4] . The pathogen was named Marburg virus after the city with the most cases and represented the first isolation of a filovirus. Erroneously, a study published in 'The Lancet' claiming that the mysterious disease was caused by rickettsia or chlamydia has frequently been cited as the first report on the causative agent of Marburg virus disease (MVD) [5] .