Uganda declares end to Ebola outbreak
January 11, 2023
Uganda declared an end to the latest outbreak of the Ebola virus on Wednesday.
"We have successfully controlled the Ebola outbreak in Uganda," Health Minister Jane Ruth Aceng said at a conference in Mubende, the district where the virus was first detected in September.
Aceng said that Wednesday marked 113 days since the first case was detected in the country, and that there were no new cases in the past 42 days, which is line with the World Health Organization recommendation for declaring an end to the disease.Forty-two days is roughly double Ebola's maximum incubation period; on average, people infected with the show symptoms in around 8-10 days.
The East African country recorded 56 deaths, from 142 cases, in the outbreak.
How Uganda defeated the virus
Uganda put residents of Mubende and Kassanda districts under lockdown until the middle of December.
Health officials elsewhere in the country implemented strong measures to trace the spread of infection, eventually bringing the virus under control.
Ebola virus can spread from one person to another through direct contact with the blood, secretions, or other bodily fluids of infected people, as well as through surfaces contaminated with the fluids.
The virus in Uganda was the rare Sudan strain against which there are no effective vaccines yet. Clinical trials of three vaccine candidates are underway in the country.
WHO praises Uganda's efforts
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a statement that Uganda had shown how Ebola can be defeated.
He said the virus can be defeated when "the whole system works together, from having an alert systems in place, to finding and caring for people affected and their contacts, to gaining the full participation of affected communities in the response."
Matshidiso Moeti, the WHO regional director for Africa, said it intitially looked like Ebola would cast a "dark shadow over the country well into 2023" because the outbreak reached major cities like Kampala and Jinja.
She said Uganda's victory in the fight "starts off the year on a note of great hope for Africa."
Health Minister Aceng said the latest chapter of the epidemic marked Uganda's seventh outbreak of the disease. She added that the source of the outbreak "like many others" was still not known.
Uganda, which shares its border with the Democratic Republic of Congo, last recorded an outbreak in 2019, when at least five people died. The country registered its most deadly outbreak in 2000, with 224 deaths from 425 cases.
rm/msh (AFP, Reuters)