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Uganda’s health ministry on Tuesday announced the country’s first death since 2019 from the highly contagious Ebola virus, declaring an outbreak in central Mubende.
“The confirmed case is a 24-year-old male…(He) developed symptoms of Ebola virus disease and later died,” the ministry tweeted, using the acronym for Ebola virus disease.
A 24-year-old man in Mubende tested positive for a “relatively rare Sudanese strain” of the virus, the World Health Organization said in a statement earlier Tuesday.
“This follows an investigation by the National Rapid Response Team into six suspected deaths in the region this month,” the WHO said.
Also read: Ghana reports highly contagious Ebola-like Marburg virus: symptoms, treatment
Eight other suspected patients are being treated, the WHO said.
“This is the first time in more than a decade that Uganda has recorded a Sudanese strain of Ebola,” said Matthidiso Morty, WHO Africa director.
“We are working closely with national health authorities to investigate the source of this outbreak, while supporting efforts to rapidly roll out effective control measures.”
The Sudanese strain has seen seven previous outbreaks, including four in Uganda and three in Sudan, the WHO said.
Uganda – which shares a porous border with the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) – has experienced several Ebola outbreaks in the past, most recently in 2019 when at least five people died.
The Democratic Republic of Congo recorded a new case in its violence-torn east last month, less than six weeks after an epidemic in the country’s northwest was declared over.
There are currently no licensed drugs to prevent or treat Ebola, although a range of experimental drugs are in development and thousands have been vaccinated in the Democratic Republic of Congo and some neighbouring countries.
Uganda’s health minister, Jane Ruth Aceng Ocero, told AFP that authorities had begun vaccinating front-line workers, including customs officials, at the Democratic Republic of Congo’s border.
“As investigations into confirmed cases are underway, we have stepped up surveillance and contact tracing of confirmed cases,” Aceng said, adding that they had deployed 12,000 doses of the Ebola vaccine.
Also read: Marburg virus outbreak in Ghana: What you need to know
Ebola is an often fatal viral hemorrhagic fever. Mortality rates are often high, as high as 90 percent in some outbreaks, according to the World Health Organization.
The virus, first identified in 1976 in the Democratic Republic of Congo (then Zaire), where its natural reservoir is bats, has since sparked a series of epidemics in Africa, killing around 15,000 people.
Human transmission is through bodily fluids and the main symptoms are fever, vomiting, bleeding and diarrhea.
Outbreaks are difficult to control, especially in urban settings.
Infected people are not contagious until they develop symptoms, which is after an incubation period of 2 to 21 days.
The worst epidemic in West Africa between 2013 and 2016 killed just over 11,300 people. The Democratic Republic of Congo has seen more than a dozen epidemics, the deadliest killing 2,280 in 2020.
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