On Thursday, Uganda said it had detected six new cases of Ebola, raising the total number of confirmed cases to seven.
The death toll from the outbreak of the disease has risen to 12, local authorities said on Wednesday.
Uganda on Tuesday country confirmed an outbreak of haemorrhagic fever in the central district of Mubende, about 150 km west of the capital Kampala.
“To give you the background the epidemic appears to have started around the beginning of September when people started dying in the small village in the Sub County called Madudu,” said Kyobe Henry Bbosa, the Incident Manager at Uganda’s Ministry of Health.
On Thursday, health officials said the country’s previous experiences would help to guide decisions in countering the latest outbreak.
According to sources, Covid treatment centers are expected to be converted into Ebola management centers.
“This current outbreak happens just at the end of the, we think of, the Covid pandemic which we think we successfully managed. And much of the infrastructure that we used for Covid we are quickly repurposing for Ebola.
But also of not, just as Patrick was speaking, we have significant capacity due to outposts within the country, for detection and also to be able to able to galvanise community support and response. So we think that using what we’ve done before we should be able to mount an appropriate response to this current outbreak,” said Kyobe.
Uganda has unfortunately experienced previous outbreaks of the highly fatal disease, with the last reported cases being in 2019 where there were at least five fatalities.