Contacts of Ebola Patient On the Rise in Mbale
BY SPURB ERNEST

More than 100 contacts of a patient who succumbed to the deadly Sudan Ebola virus are under isolation in Mbale City.
Last week, the Ministry of Health declared an Ebola outbreak after a 32-year-old male nurse from Mbale, who was working at Mulago National Referral Hospital in Kampala, succumbed to the Sudan Ebola virus. The health worker was buried in Namunsi in Mbale City last week.
Atek Kagirita the Ebola Incident Commander says that the number of contacts in Mbale keeps going up day by day as the search for more contacts continues. According to Kagirita, those under isolation will be monitored for the next 21 days.
Kagirita has asked the public to provide information to any contacts that have not yet been isolated to contain the spread of the Ebola virus.
Kagirita says that if the public does not cooperate with health authorities in the fight against the deadly Ebola virus, they might think of restrictive measures like locking down Mbale City.
Sumin Nasike the Mbale Resident City Commissioner(RCC) has urged the public to be mindful of fake news and politicization of the outbreak. According to Nasike, the government cannot use the Ebola outbreak to make political capital as some actors might want to put it.
This would be the 7th Sudan virus outbreak.
The last outbreak ended on 11th January 2023, with 164 cases (probable and confirmed) traced and 55 confirmed deaths, according to a paper Sudan Ebola virus (SUDV) outbreak in Uganda, 2022: lessons learnt and future priorities for sub-Saharan Africa by Dr Ambrose Talisuna et al. This was the sixth reported Ebola outbreak in Uganda since the first in 2000 where a cumulative total of 325 cases and 224 deaths were recorded.
The first documented EVD outbreak occurred in 1976 (47 years ago) in communities located near the Ebola river and was designated Ebola Zaire.
In the same year, an Ebola outbreak occurred in Sudan caused by a different virus strain that was designated SUDV. Since then, there have been several SUDV outbreaks, all in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA).

The most deadly of all EVD outbreaks occurred in 2014–2016, in West Africa, where 11,310 deaths and approximately 28,600 cases were recorded.
“There is no specific treatment or vaccine for SUDV but it exists for the Zaire strain. Consequently, there is an urgent need to address the current SUDV outbreak control gaps,” said Dr Talisuna et al in their paper.
SIGNS AND SYMPTOMS OF EBOLA
