Wednesday, September 21, 2022

Uganda confirms death of patient admitted as suspected Ebola case after new outbreak declared

Daniel Stewart - 

Ugandan authorities on Wednesday confirmed the death of a patient who was being monitored as a suspected Ebola case following Tuesday's outbreak, bringing to two the number of deaths from the virus.


Colored scanning electron micrograph of Ebola virus particles (green) budding and adhering to the surface of cells. - 
NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF ALLERGY AND INFECTIOUS DISEA© Provided by News 360

The spokesman of the Ugandan Ministry of Health, Emmanuel Ainebyoona, has detailed that the deceased is a child and added that the authorities "are waiting" for the results of the laboratory test to confirm that the cause of death is Ebola.

"At the moment it is a suspicious death," he said, before adding that the child was part of a group of fourteen people admitted to a hospital in Mubende with symptoms compatible with Ebola, as reported by the Ugandan newspaper 'New Vision'.

The director of the Mubende Regional Hospital, Rosemary Byabashaija, has indicated that fourteen identified contacts of the first deceased patient are in the hospital. "Since we registered the first case, we have sent a monitoring team to sensitize the population," she explained.

For their part, the Rwandan authorities have raised the health alert level in response to the Ebola outbreak in Uganda. The director general of the Rwanda Biomedical Center (RBC), Claude Mambo Muvunyi, said that the authorities are "closely monitoring" the epidemiological situation in Uganda and in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where a case was reported last month in the province of North Kivu (east).

"We believe that the outbreak in Uganda will be contained, as it is a family," he said, before detailing that the strain is also not the same as the one detected in DRC, as reported by the Rwandan newspaper 'The New Times'. "We are well prepared. We have equipment to handle Ebola cases, but we have asked for more," he said.

The World Health Organization (WHO) said Tuesday that the confirmation of the first case followed an investigation by the national rapid response team after six "suspicious deaths" in the district over the past month.

"This is the first time in more than a decade that Uganda has recorded a case of the Sudanese strain of Ebola. We are working closely with national health authorities to investigate the source of this outbreak while supporting efforts to put effective control measures in place," said WHO Director for Africa, Matshidiso Moeti.

"Uganda is no stranger to effective Ebola control. Thanks to its experience, measures have been put in place to detect the virus quickly and we can depend on this knowledge to stop the spread of infections," she concluded. Uganda reported its last case of this strain in 2012, while in 2019 it declared an outbreak by the Zaire strain, imported from Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

No comments:

Post a Comment