One dead in Uganda Ebola outbreak: health ministry

A nurse has died from Ebola in the Ugandan capital Kampala, the health ministry said Thursday.

 "An outbreak of Sudan Ebola Virus Disease has been confirmed in Kampala, Uganda following confirmation from three national reference laboratories," the ministry's permanent secretary Diana Atwine told reporters.

 The victim was described as "a 32-year-old male nurse, an employee of Mulago National Referral Hospital who initially developed fever-like symptoms".

 "The patient experienced multi-organ failure and succumbed to the illness" on Wednesday, the ministry said in a post on X.

 It said no other healthcare worker or patient on the ward had presented with signs or symptoms of Ebola.

 Rapid response teams have been mobilised, the ministry said, and 44 contacts of the patient have so far been identified, all of whom would be vaccinated.

 Sudan Ebola is one of six species of the Ebola virus.

 The disease is named after a river in the Democratic Republic of Congo, then called Zaire, where it was discovered in 1976.

 The Red Cross voiced alarm Tuesday over the risk that recent fighting in the eastern DRC city of Goma could cause samples of Ebola and other pathogens held in a laboratory to escape.

 Uganda, which shares a porous border with the DRC, last experienced an Ebola outbreak in 2022 that lasted almost four months and claimed 55 lives.

 

There is currently no confirmed vaccine for Sudan Ebola.

 But three candidate vaccines were quickly developed and trialled in Uganda after the last outbreak.

 Two districts at the epicentre of the epidemic, Mubende and Kassanda, were placed under lockdown for two months in December 2022 before that outbreak was officially declared over the following month.

 The WHO said at the time that Uganda had brought the outbreak under control through "surveillance, contact tracing and infection prevention and control".

 Outbreaks are difficult to contain, especially in urban environments.

 Human transmission is through body fluids, with the main symptoms being fever, vomiting, bleeding and diarrhoea.

 People who are infected do not become contagious until symptoms appear, which is after an incubation period of between two and 21 days.

 The deadliest epidemic unfolded in West Africa between 2013 and 2016, killing more than 11,300 people.

 The DRC has had more than a dozen epidemics, the deadliest claiming the lives of 2,280 people in 2020.