Ugandan officials have reported 11 new Ebola cases in the capital since Friday, a concerning increase in infections just over a month after an outbreak was declared in a remote region of the East African country.
Nine more people in the Kampala metropolitan area tested 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 World Health Organization official in Africa said Uganda‘s Ebola outbreak was “rapidly evolving,” describing a difficult situation for health workers.
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 from Ebola before the outbreak was confirmed in a farming community 150 kilometres (93 miles) west of Kampala.
Fears of Ebola spreading far from the outbreak’s epicentre compelled authorities to impose an ongoing lockdown, including nighttime curfews, on two of the five districts reporting Ebola cases. The measures were implemented after an Ebola patient sought treatment in Kampala and died in a hospital there.
The nine new cases reported on Monday follow a similar pattern in that they are all contacts of an Ebola-infected patient who travelled from an Ebola hotspot to seek treatment at Mulago, Kampala’s top public hospital.
There is currently no vaccine available for the Sudan strain of Ebola that is circulating in Uganda.
According to the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Ugandan officials had documented more than 1,800 Ebola contacts by Thursday, 747 of whom had completed 21 days of monitoring for possible signs of the disease, which manifests as viral hemorrhagic fever.
Contact tracing is critical for containing the spread of contagious diseases such as Ebola.
Contact with an infected person’s bodily fluids or contaminated materials spreads Ebola. Fever, vomiting, diarrhoea, muscle pain, and, at times, internal and external bleeding are all symptoms.
Scientists do not know what the natural reservoir of Ebola is, but they believe the first person infected in an outbreak contracted the virus through contact with an infected animal or by eating raw meat from an infected animal. Ugandan authorities are still looking into the origins of the current outbreak.
Uganda has experienced several Ebola outbreaks, including one in 2000 that killed over 200 people. The 2014-16 Ebola outbreak in West Africa 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.
