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Kitum Cave

April 19, 2022
in Magical Kenya, Travel
Reading Time: 2 mins read
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Kitum Cave is located in Bungoma County in the Western of Kenya. Kitum Cave is in Mount Elgon National Park and extends about 200 metres or about 700 feet into the side of Mount Elgon near the Kenyan border with Uganda. It became well known in the 1980’s when two European visitors contracted Marburg virus while there. Many years later, it was discovered that the carriers of the disease were bats residing in the caves and that the disease was air borne.

It is one of five named “elephant caves” of Mount Elgon where animals, including elephants, have been “mining” the rock for its sodium rich salts. The elephants use their tusks to break off pieces of the cave wall that they later chew and swallow. Their mining action leaves the walls scratched and furrowed which is likely to be the reason that the caves have enlarged over time.

Of note is that there is also a deep crevasse into which young elephants have fallen and died.

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Marburg virus

In the 1980s, two visitors to the cave contracted Marburg virus disease. In 1980, a French man died from the disease after visiting the cave, and in 1987 a 15-year-old Danish boy who lived in Kenya also fell ill and died after visiting the cave. Two different but very similar viruses have been catalogued from these infections: the 1980 virus is named after a doctor, Shem Musoke, who survived being infected by the French patient, while the 1987 virus is named Ravn, after the last name of the Danish patient. Based on these cases, an expedition was staged by the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Disease (USAMRIID) in an attempt to identify the vector species presumably residing in the cave. Despite sampling a wide variety of species (including fruit bats), no Marburg disease-causing viruses were found and the animal vector remained a mystery. These events were dramatized by Richard Preston in the best-selling book The Hot Zone (1994).

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In September 2007, similar expeditions to active mines in Gabon and Uganda found solid evidence of reservoirs of Marburg disease-causing virus in cave-dwelling Egyptian fruit bats. The Ugandan mines both had colonies of the same species of African fruit bats that colonize Kitum Cave, suggesting that the long-sought vector at Kitum was indeed the bats and their guano. The study was conducted after two mine workers contracted Marburg virus disease in August 2007, both without being bitten by any bats, suggesting virus may be propagated through inhalation of powdered guano.

Ref: wikipedia

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