On Wednesday, Uganda announced the end of a nearly four-month Ebola outbreak that it had managed to quickly contain despite the lack of a known vaccine for the particular viral strain in question.
“We have successfully controlled the spread of Ebola in Uganda,” Health Minister Jane Ruth Aceng said during a ceremony to mark the outbreak’s end.
Since Uganda’s first and deadliest Ebola outbreak, which killed more than half of the 425 people it infected, in 2000, there have been eight outbreaks in the country, according to Aceng.
According to data from the health ministry, 55 of the 143 persons who contracted the virus during the most recent outbreak died. Health professionals were among the six fatalities.
The proclamation was made on Wednesday after Uganda had gone 42 days without any new instances of the virus, or two complete incubation periods.
Early on in the outbreak, cases were found in a number of different districts, including Kampala, 150 km to the west of the outbreak’s epicentre in Mubende.
The director-general of the World Health Organisation (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, praised Uganda for its response to the virus.
“Uganda has shown that Ebola can be defeated when the whole system works together, from having an alert system in place, to finding and caring for people affected and their contacts, to gaining the full participation of affected communities in the response,” he said in a statement.
President of Uganda Yoweri Museveni stated that the chance for urgent quarantine of contacts was lost because to the two-week delay in notifying the outbreak following the first probable Ebola fatality.
However, by November, after enforcing a lockdown in the affected districts, health officials had managed to turn the tide against the disease.
Ebola has a 50% fatality rate and spreads through contact with an infected person’s bodily fluids. During the West African pandemic that lasted from 2013 to 2016, around 11,300 people perished.
The viral strain responsible for the outbreak in Uganda, Ebola Sudan, lacks a vaccine, in contrast to the more widespread variant, Ebola Zaire, which has been linked to multiple recent outbreaks in the neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo.