The Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO) announced today that he is in Uganda, which has recorded 19 confirmed cases of Ebola, including two deaths, due to an outbreak that spread from neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo.
“I am in Uganda, where the government has put in place a rapid and effective response to the Ebola outbreak. Border controls have allowed cases originating from neighbouring DR Congo to be identified, and systems for surveillance, diagnostic testing and case care are continuously operating,” WHO chief Tedros Antano Gomes noted in a post on X.
A WHO spokesman in Geneva, Switzerland, told AFP that the WHO chief “met this morning (today) with Uganda’s health minister” Jane Ruth Acheng.
“Of the 19 confirmed cases to date, 14 involve people who arrived from DR Congo and five are Ugandan nationals,” Tedros clarified in his X post.
Also out of these 19 confirmed cases in Uganda, 2 people from DR Congo died. “Our thoughts go out to their families,” he noted.
The DR Congo declared an Ebola outbreak on May 15, the 17th in this African country of more than 100 million people. In it, 515 cases of Ebola have been confirmed, including 91 deaths, according to the WHO.
The World Health Organization has issued an international health alert. It considers the public health risk to be very high in DR Congo, high regionally and low globally.
For the Bundibugyo strain to which the current outbreak is due, there is no vaccine and no approved treatment.
“WHO offers its support to Uganda in the fight against the Ebola epidemic, alongside Africa CDC (the African Union health agency) and partners across the region as the country leads this response,” added Tedros.
“Thanks to continued cooperation, I am confident that this epidemic can be brought under control,”
Ebola, which is transmitted through close contact with infected people or bodily fluids, has claimed the lives of more than 15,000 people in Africa over the past fifty years.
The WHO and the African Union health department on Friday drew up a $518 million (about 446 million euros) plan to fight the epidemic over the next six months, mainly by prioritizing enhanced surveillance, laboratory tests and infection prevention.
The epidemic in the Democratic Republic of Congo is centred in the eastern province of Ituri, which is difficult to access due to the poor state of the roads and lack of security due to the activities of armed groups.
The EU Commissioner for Crisis Management, Haja Labib, who is visiting Bunia, the capital of Ituri, yesterday, Sunday, called for a ceasefire in the eastern part of DR Congo, where several armed groups are active and where the Rwandan-backed anti-government group M23 has taken control of large swathes of territory.
