KAMPALA, UG – Ugandan officials have reported 11 new Ebola incidents in the capital since Friday, a concerning rise in infections little over a month since an epidemic was declared in a remote place of the East African state.
9 more individuals in the Kampala metro area screened positive for Ebola on Sunday, joining two others who tested positive on Friday, according to Health Minister Jane Ruth Aceng on Monday.
Last week, a top WHO official in Africa said Uganda’s Ebola outbreak was “rapidly evolving,” describing a complicated situation for healthcare personnel.
Since September 20, Ugandan health officials have confirmed 75 Ebola cases, including 28 deaths. There are currently 19 open cases. The official figures do not include those who died of Ebola prior to the outbreak 93 miles west of Kampala.
Concerns of Ebola spreading far from the outbreak’s epicenter forced authorities to enforce a currently underway lockdown, which include nighttime curfews, on two of the five districts disclosing Ebola cases.
The measures were implemented after an Ebola patient sought medical attention in Kampala and passed away in a hospital there.
The nine newly reported incidents on Monday follow a similar pattern in that they are all contacts of an Ebola-infected patient who made the journey from an Ebola hotspot to seek treatment at Mulago, Kampala’s leading public hospital.
There is currently no vaccine available for the Sudan variant of Ebola that is circulating in Uganda.
By Thursday, Ugandan authorities had documented over 1,800 Ebola contacts, 747 of who had under gone 21 days of monitoring for possible signs according to Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Contact tracing is critical for containing the spread of infectious diseases such as Ebola. Contact with an infected person’s bodily fluids or contaminated materials spreads Ebola. Fever, vomiting, diarrhea, muscle pain, as well as, at times, both internal and external bleeding are all symptoms.
Scientists do not know what the natural source of Ebola is, but they believe the first person infected in an outbreak contracted the virus via contact with an infected animal or by consuming raw meat from an infected animal. Ugandan authorities are still looking into the origins of the outbreaks.
Uganda has experienced several Ebola epidemics, including one in 2000 that mowed down over 200 people. The 2014-16 Ebola West African outbreak killed over 11,000 people, making it the disease’s deadliest outbreak.
Ebola was discovered in two simultaneous outbreaks in South Sudan and Congo in 1976, in a village near the Ebola River, after which the disease was named.
