Ugandan officials on Thursday confirmed an Ebola outbreak in the capital city of Kampala, with one confirmed death so far.
It is the ninth Ebola outbreak Uganda has suffered since the deadly disease was first detected there in 2000. The previous outbreak in 2022 lasted four months and killed 55 people.
The Ugandan Health Ministry said the fatally-infected patient was a male nurse who worked at the Mulago National Referral Hospital in Kampala. He died from “multi-organ failure” at the hospital on Wednesday.
The ministry apprehensively reported that the man sought treatment from both modern facilities and traditional healers, potentially spreading what he believed was a stubborn fever.
Forty-four people who came in contact with the patient have thus far been designated for contact tracing, including 30 health workers and patients at Mulago Hospital. Kampala is a densely populated city with a great deal of cross-border traffic to neighboring African nations, so tracing everyone who might have been infected will be difficult.
According to the Ugandan Health Ministry, one of the venues where the deceased patient sought treatment was a public hospital near the border with Kenya.
The ministry said it would launch a vaccination program immediately, but the patient appears to have suffered from the Sudan strain of Ebola, formally known as SUDV, which was also involved in the 2022 outbreak. There is no official vaccine for the Sudan strain at the moment, although three candidate vaccines were tested in the late stages of the 2022 outbreak.
Ebola is a hemorrhagic fever whose symptoms include fever, fatigue, muscle pain, headache, and sore throat during the early or “dry” stages. Later, the disease causes vomiting, diarrhea, rashes, and internal and external bleeding during its “wet” stage.
Patients can die from organ failure, brain inflammation, and reduced blood flow. Ebola spreads primarily through contact with bodily fluids from an infected individual, although contact with infected animals or eating their meat is also believed to cause infections. With modern treatments, the fatality rate from Ebola can range from 25 percent to 90 percent, depending on the strain involved and treatments available.
Ugandan health secretary Diana Atwine assured reporters on Thursday that the authorities are “in full control of the situation.”
World Health Organization (W.H.O.) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesis said on Thursday that a “full-scale response” to the Ebola outbreak has been initiated by the Ugandan government and its partners.
“W.H.O. is supporting the government through our country office and our emergencies program. We have made an initial allocation of $1 million from the Contingency Fund for Emergencies,” he said.
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