The latest Ebola outbreak was first recorded in August 2018 in Congo, where the infectious disease has since affected over 2,000 people and caused the death of at least 1,390 people. Ugandan officials this week confirmed border health workers had identified the Ebola virus in three members of a family crossing the porous border between Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) – two of which passed away. Jane Ruth Acing, Uganda’s Health Minister, told DW: “The Ebola outbreak in the DRC is still going on and as today we have over 2,000 confirmed cases.
“The probability of more cases crossing over into Uganda is very high.
“We are very cognisant that many more people are coming to support the response.
“This many more people will not be vaccinated so, from Friday, we shall begin vaccination again of frontline health workers, other workers and ring vaccination for the contacts.”
A five-year-old boy and his grandmother died shortly after returning to Uganda after visiting relatives in the DRC. Another three-year-old boy remains in quarantine.
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Save the Children Uganda’s Head of Communications Alun McDonald has warned “now is the time to act” to keep the Ebola outbreak from reaching levels of devastation similar to the epidemic which hit West Africa in 2016 causing 11,325 deaths.
Mr McDonald told DW: “It shows no sign of ending.
“Now it has crossed the border, and potentially could also cross into other countries in the region.
“This really is the time to act to make sure that it doesn’t grow into a crisis of the scale we saw in West Africa.”
The World Health Organisation (WHO) has dispatched members of a Rapid Response team to Kasese, in Western Uganda, to provide local officials with additional help to identify cases of Ebola.
Last week, a WHO expert warned roughly a quarter of Ebola infections in the country’s eastern regions were going undetected or found too late because people are refusing treatment.
Dr Mike Ryan, executive director of WHO’s Health Emergencies Programme, told a news briefing in Geneva: “We believe, let me be very cautious here, we believe we are probably detecting in excess of 75 percent of cases – we may be missing up to a quarter of cases,”
Around 90 percent of people potentially exposed to the killer disease have agreed to be vaccinated, he continued. “It’s not them that matter now, it’s the 10 percent that don’t, because all of our cases are coming from that group.”
More than 130,000 people have been vaccinated to date, according to Congolese health officials.
Ebola is a haemorrhagic fever that causes flu-like pains, bleeding, vomiting and diarrhoea and spreads among humans through contact with bodily fluids of an infected person.
Efforts to contain its spread are being hampered by poor healthcare infrastructure and resistance from communities who believe Ebola is a conspiracy made up by aid agencies and the government.