Ugandan authorities have reported 11 more Ebola cases in the capital since Friday, marking a worrying rise in infections just over a month after an outbreak was declared in a remote part of the East African country. I was.
Health Minister Jane Ruth Asen said on Monday that nine more people tested positive for Ebola on Sunday in the Kampala metropolitan area, joining two others on Friday.
A senior African World Health Organization official said last week that the Ebola outbreak in Uganda was “evolving rapidly” and was a difficult situation for health workers.
Uganda’s health authorities have confirmed 75 Ebola cases, including 28 deaths, since 20 September. There are 19 active cases.
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Official figures do not include those who may have died from Ebola before the outbreak was confirmed in a rural village about 140 km west of Kampala.
Concerns that Ebola could spread far from the epicenter of the outbreak prompted authorities to impose ongoing curfews in two of the five districts where Ebola cases were reported, including an overnight curfew. forced to impose a blockade. Measures were taken after an Ebola-infected man was treated in Kampala and died in hospital.
The nine new cases reported on Monday follow a similar pattern as they are contacts of Ebola-infected patients who traveled from Ebola hotspots and sought treatment at Kampala’s premier public hospital, known as Murago. increase.
There is no effective vaccine against the Sudan strain of Ebola circulating in Uganda.
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Ugandan authorities had recorded more than 1,800 Ebola contacts by Thursday, with 747 of them under 21-day surveillance for possible signs of the disease manifesting as viral hemorrhagic fever, according to the African Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Completed.
Contact tracing is key to stopping the spread of epidemics like Ebola.
Ebola is spread through contact with bodily fluids of an infected person or contaminated materials. Symptoms include fever, vomiting, diarrhea, muscle pain, and sometimes internal and external bleeding.
Scientists don’t know the natural host of Ebola, but they suspect that the first person infected in the outbreak may have contracted the virus by coming into contact with an infected animal or eating its raw meat. . Ugandan officials are investigating the cause of the current outbreak.
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Uganda has had multiple Ebola outbreaks, including one that killed more than 200 people in 2000. Between 2014 and 2016, the Ebola epidemic in West Africa killed more than 11,000 people.
Two simultaneous outbreaks of Ebola hemorrhagic fever were discovered in South Sudan and Congo in 1976 and originated in a village near the Ebola River, hence the name of the disease.