A nurse in Uganda has died of Ebola in the first recorded fatality since the country’s last outbreak of the disease ended in early 2023, a health official said.
The 32-year-old male nurse worked at Mulago Hospital, the main referral facility in the capital, Kampala. After developing a fever, he was treated at several locations before multiple lab tests confirmed he had been suffering from Ebola.
AP reports that he died on Wednesday and the Sudan strain of Ebola was confirmed after postmortem tests.
At least 44 contacts of his have already been identified, including 30 health workers and patients at Mulago Hospital, said Uganda’s Ministry of Health.
Tracing contacts is key to stemming the spread of Ebola, and there are no approved vaccines for the Sudan strain, although Uganda received some trial vaccine doses during the last outbreak, which was discovered in September 2022 and killed at least 55 people before being declared over in January 2023.
Viral outbreaks
Confirmation of Ebola in Uganda is the latest in a trend of outbreaks of viral haemorrhagic fevers in the east African region. Tanzania declared an outbreak of the Ebola-like Marburg disease earlier this month, and in December, Rwanda announced that its own outbreak of Marburg was over.
The ongoing Marburg outbreak in northern Tanzania’s Kagera region has killed at least two people.
The World Health Organisation will send an initial allocation of $1m from a contingency fund to support Uganda’s response, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO director-general, said in a brief statement posted on X.
“A full scale response is being initiated by the government and partners,” the statement said.
Kampala’s outbreak could prove difficult to respond to, because the city has a highly mobile population of about 4m. The nurse who died had sought treatment at a hospital just outside Kampala and later travelled to Mbale, in the country’s east, where he was admitted to a public hospital.
Health authorities said he had also consulted a traditional healer.
Emmanuel Batiibwe, a physician who helped lead Uganda’s efforts to stop the country’s 2022 outbreak, told The Associated Press that he expected a swift response in tracing all possible Ebola contacts in Kampala and elsewhere.
“Our reaction should be swift, decisive and well-co-ordinated,” he said, speaking of lessons learned from the 2022 outbreak, whose epicentre was a town in central Uganda. “We have the means of responding quickly now.”
Reuters reports that Ugandan authorities have used capacity built up over years, such as laboratory testing, patient care know-how, contact tracing and other skills, to bring recent outbreaks under control in relatively short order.
Vaccination against Ebola for all contacts of the deceased will begin immediately, the Ministry said.
Scientists don’t know the natural reservoir of Ebola, but they suspect the first person infected in an outbreak acquired the virus through contact with an infected animal or eating its raw meat.
Ugandan officials are still investigating the source of the current outbreak. The country has had multiple Ebola outbreaks, including one in 2000 that killed hundreds. The 2014-16 outbreak in West Africa killed more than 11 000 people, the disease’s largest death toll.
Ebola was discovered in 1976 in two simultaneous outbreaks in South Sudan and Congo, where it occurred in a village near the Ebola River, after which the disease is named.
Reuters article – Uganda confirms outbreak of Ebola in capital Kampala, one dead (Open access)
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