Ugandan President highlights efforts to contain Ebola virus

Those districts have completed 42 days or two incubation cycles for the virus with no new infections reported, while in Mubindi and Kasanda, where the largest number of patients are currently concentrated, positive diagnoses are also declining.

Museveni said in a televised news conference the day before that Mubindi residents had largely complied with the quarantine, but that Kasanda residents had broken some rules, including a family exhuming a relative who died of the hemorrhagic virus to rebury him.

He said this incident left 11 subsequent deaths due to infection.

As part of the restrictions imposed to contain the spread of the Ebola virus, the president banned the movement of loggers in and out of the two districts after it was revealed that they were being used to smuggle people out of quarantine areas.

He announced that the authorities had handed over the names of all those in contact with confirmed cases to the immigration departments at the borders to prevent them from traveling and exporting the disease to other countries.

Museveni stressed that “the government is doing its best to control this epidemic and prevent exports outside Uganda.”

On the other hand, last Sunday, Minister of Health Jane Ruth Aseng confirmed a case of Ebola in Jinja, in the east of the country, marking the first time that the outbreak had spread to a new region of the country from central Uganda. , where cases have been restricted so far.

The virus circulating is the Sudan strain, for which there is no proven vaccine, unlike the more common Zaire strain, which spread during recent outbreaks in the neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Uganda has so far recorded 141 infections and 55 deaths, according to figures released by the Ministry of Health. The outbreak was declared in the country on 20 September.

m / tiger