The number of Ebola cases registered in Uganda rose to 36, according to the Ugandan Health Ministry's statement on Monday.
There are 18 confirmed and 18 "probable" cases among the 36 detected, with 35 more active cases on admission.
The death toll has also increased by two to 23 as of September 25, five of which were confirmed and 18 of which are being treated as "probable” Ebola.
The outbreak in Uganda was declared in early September. Fortunately, the detected Sudan strain appears to be one of the less deadly ones, as per scientists at the Uganda Virus Research Institute.
According to local media, the current outbreak spread to three districts in the central part of the country.
It isn’t the first time that the disease has hit the country. Outbreaks were also registered in 2000 (224 dead), 2007 (37 dead), 2011 (1 dead), in 2012 (21 dead) and 2019 (4 dead).
Ebola Virus Disease
Ebola virus is a disease with high mortality, which can strike both humans and animals, mostly primates. The disease can be transmitted from an animal to human, as well as from human to human through all kinds of body fluids.
Common symptoms of Ebola are high fever, diarrhea, abdominal pains, vomiting blood, unexplained hemorrhaging and fatigue.
There are six identified Ebola stains, four of which can cause disease in the human body with mortality estimated to vary from 25% to 90%, according to WHO’s statement.
The first Ebola outbreaks were detected in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Sudan (now South Sudan) in 1976, when 280 people died out of 318 who were infected, with 88% fatality.
The period from 1980 to 1993 is seen by observers as a standstill as no cases among humans were registered.
However, from 1994, the virus appeared again, reaching alarming numbers in the 2013-2016 outbreak in West Africa. At the time, more than 11,000 people out of almost 29,000 infected died in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.
In 2018, Ebola claimed the lives of more than 2,000 people in DRC, according to the WHO.
Two licensed vaccines against Ebola disease exist to date. However, due to the unpredictable nature and relative rareness of Ebola outbreaks, there’s no practice of using them ubiquitously, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).