Reuters
ANNOUNCEMENTS•
Uganda’s Ebola outbreak is over, the country’s health ministry said. The Sudan Ebola virus outbreak lasted nearly four months.
According to the health minister, the virus has been stopped by measures such as surveillance and contact tracing. “In these efforts, the population has played a decisive role. They understood the importance of doing what was necessary to end the epidemic,” he says.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), a total of 164 cases have been reported, of which 142 have been confirmed. 55 patients died and 87 recovered.
Body fluids
“Uganda has shown that Ebola can be defeated if the whole system works, from an early warning system to finding and treating patients and their contacts,” said WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
A country is declared Ebola-free if no new infections are detected for 42 days. That’s double the incubation time. Ebola is transmitted through bodily fluids. Infected people can develop high fever and severe bleeding.
Frequent outbreaks
There have been multiple outbreaks in Uganda. For example, the virus killed hundreds of people in 2000. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which borders Uganda, nearly 2,300 people died from the disease between 2018 and 2020.
Ebola is named after a river in the Congo where the disease was first discovered in 1976.