As of August 23, 2005, Angola’s Ministry of Health reported 374 cases (329 deaths) of Marburg hemorrhagic fever, including 368 cases in the northern province of Uíge. The response to this outbreak was organized by the Ministry of Health with the support of international teams. The international response, deployed through the World Health Organization’s Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN), required the participation of more than 20 partner organizations for nearly six months. The scale of this outbreak, the largest ever recorded, illustrates the complexity of control measures and their implementation. As with Ebola, this type of epidemic is particularly traumatic for the affected populations. Nosocomial spread and the very nature of the control measures to be implemented contribute to a profound erosion of public trust in healthcare facilities and, more generally, in the system deployed to control the epidemic. The response to these health crises therefore requires a multidisciplinary approach that, in addition to aspects such as case identification, medical care, and infection control, must incorporate a social mobilization component from the very outset of the response. Understanding the local context is indeed essential for developing and adapting prevention messages and control measures and making the latter acceptable to the population. Following nearly 30 years of civil war, the country’s healthcare infrastructure has been permanently dismantled. On its own, Angola would have struggled to cope with an epidemic of this magnitude. Without adequate resources, this epidemic could have spread very rapidly to other Angolan provinces or neighboring countries. This epidemic, like others before it, illustrates the importance of understanding these crises within a global context and the need for a structured global network to respond to international health crises. (R.A.)