In September 2024, Dr. Sabin Nsanzimana, Rwanda’s minister of health, was in a training exercise simulating an outbreak of hemorrhagic fever. Later that month, he and his colleagues confronted an eerily similar situation: In Kigali, a tin miner and his wife were ill with an acute disease that soon began to spread.
It was Marburg virus, a deadly hemorrhagic illness with Ebola-like symptoms that in past outbreaks has killed up to 88% of people afflicted. There had never been an outbreak in Rwanda, but Nsanzimana and his colleagues leapt into action, contact tracing and testing. They also reached out to the Sabin Vaccine Institute in the U.S. (no relation to Nsanzimana), which has a Marburg vaccine in clinical trials. The institute sent more than 1,700 experimental vaccine doses to Rwanda, and a vaccination campaign was soon in full swing.
By Dec. 20, 2024, the outbreak was over. Out of 66 cases, only 15 people died, and Marburg was preventing from spreading beyond Rwanda—a testament to Nsanzimana’s swift action, yielding key lessons for stopping future viral outbreaks that the Sabin Institute has implemented already in a 2025 outbreak in Ethiopia.