A deadly new hemorrhagic virus has been identified in Africa after it infected five people, killing four of them. The so-called "Lujo" virus causes bleeding like the Ebola virus.
The outbreak of the new virus began last September when a women in Zambia became ill with a fever-like illness that quickly became much more serious. She was taken to a hospital in South Africa, where she died, the Associated Press reported.
A paramedic who treated the woman and three health-care workers also became infected and three of them died. It's believed the virus spreads from person to person through contact with infected body fluids, investigators said.
"This (virus) is really, really aggressive," Dr. Ian Lipkin, a Columbia University epidemiologist involved in the discovery of the new virus, told the AP. He and his colleagues reported on the virus in a paper published online in the journal PLoS Pathogens.