Experts searching how Uganda’s first ebola victim was infected

Kampala, Uganda | THE INDEPENDENT | The World Health Organisation (WHO) revealed that scientists are yet to identify how the Ugandan health worker who succumbed to the Sudan virus disease got infected.

Speaking at a meeting on Thursday, Otim Patrick Ramadan, a Health Emergency Officer at the World Health Organisation Africa office revealed that they had dispatched a team of epidemiologists to the different health facilities where the deceased health worker worked to help them determine the source of the current outbreak.

He said the teams are currently reviewing medical records to establish the patients that the nurse got in contact with and how they clinically presented.

The nurse who was working at the National Referral Hospital in Mulago as well as other private health facilities succumbed to complications of viral hemorrhagic disease on January 29. Six other people have since been confirmed through laboratory tests to have contracted the disease.

As of  Tuesday, two hundred and ninety – eight people including health workers and family members of the deceased had been listed from several districts including Kampala, Mbale and Wakiso.

It is not yet clear how many of these have since been confirmed positive or let go as the Health Ministry has been slow to share such information. When asked about the latest at a news conference in Mbale on Wednesday, Health Minister Dr Jane Ruth Aceng told journalists that releasing the numbers doesn’t matter and that updates about the outbreak will be relayed to the media and the public every two weeks.

This latest development is concerning considering that Uganda has been applauded globally for being transparent and having a fluid flow of information during public health emergencies of this nature.

Risk communication is considered vital by public health experts as integral in interrupting further transmission of the virus.

Otim re-emphasized the need for informing communities as this way they will be able to assess their risk and take necessary precautions.

So far, eight districts have been classified as very high risk. This is Uganda’s eighth Ebola Disease outbreak of which six are due to the Sudan virus. The most recent previous outbreak happened in September 2022 starting with the districts of Mubende and Kassanda before spilling to at least seven other districts.

While sequencing and surveillance are still ongoing to determine with exactness the source of the current outbreak, Dr Ngashi Ngongo, the Head of Executive at the Africa Center for Disease Control – Africa CDC said at a news conference this evening that it’s possible that transmission could have been ongoing but undetected from the previous outbreak.

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