The Ugandan Health Ministry has confirmed the death of a nurse following the outbreak of Ebola Virus Disease in the country.
The permanent secretary of the ministry, Diana Atwine, made this disclosure while addressing newsmen on Thursday.
“An outbreak of Sudan Ebola Virus Disease has been confirmed in Kampala, Uganda following confirmation from three national reference laboratories,” Atwine said.
Atwine described the victim as a 32-year-old male nurse, an employee of Mulago National Referral Hospital who initially developed fever-like symptoms.
According to the ministry in a post on X, the patient experienced multi-organ failure and succumbed to the illness.
The ministry said no other health care worker or patient on the ward had presented with signs or symptoms of Ebola.
It further stated that rapid response teams have been mobilised, and 44 contacts of the patient have so far been identified, all of whom would be vaccinated.
DAILY POST reports that 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.
Meanwhile, the Red Cross voiced alarm on 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.
DAILY POST reports that human transmission of Ebola 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 no fewer than 11,300 people.
It was gathered that he D.R. Congo has had more than a dozen epidemics, the deadliest claiming the lives of 2,280 people in 2020.
