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27-04-2025
KAMPALA: Uganda has officially declared the end of its latest Ebola outbreak, three months after the first cases emerged in the capital, Kampala.
The Ministry of Health announced the milestone on Saturday via its official social media account, calling it “good news” and confirming that 42 days had passed without new infections since the last patient was discharged.
“During this outbreak, 14 cases, 12 confirmed and two not confirmed through laboratory tests [probable], were reported. Four deaths, two confirmed and two probable, occurred. Ten people recovered from the infection,” The World Health Organization (WHO) said in a statement.
WHO Chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus applauded the Ugandan Health Ministry for its “leadership and commitment” in overcoming the outbreak. “Congratulations to the government and health workers of #Uganda on ending the #Ebola outbreak,” he said on X on Saturday.
Ebola infections are frequent in Uganda which has many tropical forests that are natural reservoirs for the virus.
The latest outbreak, caused by the Sudan strain of the virus, was detected on January 30 this year when a male nurse contracted the virus and later died. The strain has no approved vaccine.
It was Uganda’s ninth outbreak since the country recorded its first infection in 2000.
Neighboring the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a country that has experienced more than a dozen outbreaks, including one from 2018 to 2020 which killed nearly 2,300 people, Uganda remains highly vulnerable to the spread of the disease.
The latest outbreak began in Kampala, a bustling city of four million people and a key transit hub linking eastern DRC, Kenya, Rwanda and South Sudan. Health experts say Uganda has been able to leverage on its experience battling the disease over the years to bring them under control relatively quickly.
Ebola is spread through contact with infected bodily fluids and tissues, with symptoms such as severe headache, muscle pain, vomiting blood and internal bleeding.
A month after an Ebola outbreak struck Uganda in September 2022, Edward Kayiwa began feeling unwell; headaches, fever and muscle pain. He knew something was wrong, and that he had two options, go to a hospital or believe the rumours that were circulating in his community and stay home.
“I knew I was infected, but the fear was overwhelming,” the 32-year-old truck driver told media about the epidemic that lasted four months and killed 55 people.
His fear stemmed from conspiracy theories that patients treated in the community were being injected with substances that killed them instantly. It took him two days to realize no one was being killed and some were even recovering. After that, “I personally called an ambulance to pick me up,” he says.
The 2022 health crisis was Uganda’s seventh outbreak of Ebola, a highly infectious hemorrhagic disease and it’s fifth of the Sudan virus (SVD) strain, which has a more than 40 percent fatality rate.
Kayiwa, one of 142 confirmed cases that time was lucky to survive, though many others were not.
Now, just two years later, on January 30, 2025, Uganda announced its latest Sudan Ebola outbreak. The Ministry of Health identified a 32-year-old male nurse who had died as the first documented case. He was an employee at Mulago National Referral Hospital, the country’s top medical facility.
The nurse initially developed fever-like symptoms and sought treatment at two health facilities in the greater Kampala area and another in eastern Uganda, near the Kenyan border. (Int’l News Desk)
