Health Ministry confirms new Ebola case in Kasese

Kampala, Uganda | THE INDEPENDENT | The Ministry of Health has confirmed a new Ebola case in Kasese, Uganda. Bwera town is located in Kasese district, situated 472 km west of Kampala.

A nine-year-old girl who had travelled from the Democratic Republic of Congo has been found to have Ebola, authorities said on Thursday.

The child and her mother entered the country through Mpondwe border post to seek medical care in Bwera, Kasese district. A blood sample was drawn immediately and sent for testing at the Uganda Virus research Institute and confirmed positive .

Since the child was identified at the point of entry, there are no contacts in Uganda, the Ministry of Health said in a statement, adding that together with partners, they had now dispatched a rapid response team to Kasese.

This is the fourth confirmed case of Ebola in Uganda in the past three months since the deadly disease was declared in DRC in  August, 2018.

The first three cases included a two boys and their grand mother who had previously traveled to DRC to bury a relative.

The health ministry of the Republic of Uganda had last month announced that all contacts with the index case completed their obligatory 21-day monitoring period without developing signs of the disease.

The “index case” was the five-year-old Ugandan boy who was the first of the two to die, followed by his grandmother.

They were then placed in an isolation ward in the DRC but fled and returned to Uganda across the porous border, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

Earlier this month, Uganda said it had started a trial of an experimental Ebola vaccine that may be used in neighbouring DR Congo where an outbreak of the disease has killed more than 1,900 people.

The trial of the MVA-BN vaccine developed by Johnson & Johnson is expected to last two years.

At present there is no licenced drug to prevent or treat Ebola although a range of experimental drugs are in development.

Uganda has suffered Ebola outbreaks in the past but nothing on the scale of the DR Congo epidemic, which began in August 2018.

It is the second-worst outbreak on record, eclipsed only by the 2013-2016 epidemic in West Africa, which killed more than 11,300 out of 29,000 documented cases.