Three people have died of Ebola in Uganda, bringing the death toll to four in the past three days, with authorities announcing an “epidemic” in the center of the country, the Ugandan Ministry of Health said Friday.
Three new deaths have been recorded in the last 24 hours,” the Health Ministry said in a statement. All the deaths were recorded in the Mubende district, some 150 kilometers west of the capital, Kampala.
The health authorities of this African country in the Great Lakes region had announced on Tuesday the death of a 24-year-old man from the Ebola virus, the first since 2019.
Uganda has experienced previous outbreaks of Ebola, a disease that has killed thousands of people in Africa since it was first discovered in 1976 in the neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
The last cases in the country were recorded in 2019, with at least five deathsafter the “virus was imported from RDCongo, which was experiencing a major outbreak in its northeastern region,” according to the WHO.
In a previous outbreak in 2000, 200 people died.
An Ebola case was also reported in the Congolese province of North Kivu, which borders Rwanda and Uganda, in August, less than six weeks after an outbreak in eastern DR Congo was declared over on 14 January. the country.
Ebola is usually deadly, but vaccines and treatments are now available for hemorrhagic fever, which is transmitted to humans through infected animals.
at tHuman transmission is through bodily fluids., the main symptoms being fever, vomiting, bleeding and diarrhea. Infected people only become contagious after symptoms begin, after an incubation period of two to 21 days.
The disease has six different strains, three of which (Bundibugyo, Sudan, Zaire) are at the origin of major epidemics.
Source: Observadora
