A young child died from the Ebola virus in Uganda, the second victim of an epidemic announced in late January, the Ministry of Health announced on Saturday.
On Tuesday, the country of East Africa confirmed that it had recorded 10 cases of Sudan Ebola from the often deadly virus – including that of a nurse at the Mulago National Reference Hospital, who died.
On Saturday, he announced that an “additional positive case” was detected in Mulago.
The deceased, a four-year-old child, was “a resident of Kibuli (in the capital, Kampala) linked to primary cluster,” he said.
The authorities said on February 19 that they thought that the epidemic, which had been announced for the first time on January 30, had been “contained” after eight of the people known to be infected with treatment and recovered.
In total, 265 other people were placed “under the forties for surveillance” in the hospitals of Kampala and the eastern city of Mbale after having come into contact with the nurse who died in late January.
This is the sixth epidemic in Uganda of Sudan Ebola, a strain of the virus for which there is no approved vaccine.
A vaccination trial for tension was launched in the country at the beginning of the month. He was praised by the World Health Organization as the “fastest deployment” of an Ebola vaccine test in the middle of an epidemic.
Ebola is transmitted between people through body fluids. Infected people do not become contagious before the appearance of symptoms – mainly fever, vomiting, bleeding and diarrhea – which occur after an incubation period between two and 21 days.
The previous Ebola epidemic in Uganda lasted four months in 2022 and 2023, making 55 lives.
The deadliest epidemic of hemorrhagic fever occurred in West Africa between 2013 and 2016 and killed more than 11,300 people, according to WHO estimates.
More than 15,000 people in Africa died from Ebola – the six -strains combined – during the last half century.
