Christopher Mason & Grace Natabaalo
20 February 2008
Bundibugyo/Kampala — THE Ministry of Health is today expected to declare Uganda Ebola-free.
The announcement, following an outbreak late last year that put western Uganda on high alert will, however, be marked quietly in the most heavily-affected area, Bundibugyo District.
Celebrations there to mark the occasion will take place on February 27 rather than today, according to the Ministry of Health Officials. "We won't have any celebrations [on Wednesday]," Dr Collins Tusingwire, a Kampala-based senior medical officer with the Ministry said. Dr Tusingwire has been working in Bundibugyo since the Ebola outbreak.
"The celebrations have been postponed to February 27 due to logistical problems," he said.
The Commissioner of Health Services, Dr Sam Okware confirmed the celebrations were planned for February 27, but said they had been planned for that day all along to allow time to refurbish the epicenter of the outbreak, Kikyo Health Centre IV, among other preparations.
In an ongoing series examining the outbreak and its aftermath, Daily Monitor today looks at the response to initial reports in August of a strange illness in the hills of the Rwenzori mountains and why it took until late November to be finally diagnose as the deadly Ebola virus.
To many observers it seemed too convenient for an Ebola outbreak to be announced only days after the world's attention had shifted away from Uganda, following the closure of the much-anticipated Commonwealth meetings (Chogm) on November 25.
The government and medical officials denied accusations of a cover-up. Most residents of Bundibugyo do not talk of a Chogm cover-up but instead talk about the frustrating months spent wondering if the illness was poisoning, then a cholera outbreak, malaria or even, as one government report suggested in late September, an intestinal worms epidemic.
That report, issued by the first team of investigators reportedly angered Mr Julius Monday, who runs the Kikyo Health Center IV that admitted 91 of the region's 149 reported Ebola cases.
"I said No. The little medicine I studied tells me this is not worms," Mr Monday said.
He said he resisted the report's advice that he conduct a de-worming campaign.
According to health workers in the area, Bundibugyo Hospital operated on several suspected Ebola patients, under the impression they had intestinal worms.
That diagnosis was corrected when a second team of investigators arrived in the second week of November. They took blood samples from 20 patients suffering from the mysterious illness.
The report issued on November 18 by that team provides the most concrete information.
The team comprised Ministry of Health, Mulago Hospital and Bundibugyo health officials.
That report lists Ebola among several potential explanations of the until-then mysterious disease.
The report, though, downplayed the possibility of Ebola. "However during this outbreak only four cases have had mild to moderate bleeding and not as severe as seen in typical VHF [Viral hemorrhagic fevers] cases," the report states.
"In addition, none of the suspected cases gave history of travel to DRC in the recent past." It was the 20 blood samples taken by this team, eight of which tested positive for Ebola, which formed the basis for the government's announcement of an Ebola outbreak on November 29.
The late diagnosis also came in part because this was a new strain of Ebola that took experts longer to diagnose because the blood samples did not match with known strains of the virus.
Others say it took district officials too long to appreciate the seriousness of the outbreak, which delayed the notification of central and international authorities, who responded quickly once the outbreak was identified.
Mr Monday, during a recent interview at his Health Centre, said he first became concerned that the illness was highly infectious, and deadly, when his second health worker became sick in late October.
"That's when I began to think that this was something highly contagious," Mr Monday said. "But when the news came that this was Ebola I didn't eat for three days."
Into November, he and his workers had been handling Ebola patients for three months without even rubber gloves.
Be the first to Write a Comment!
Copyright © 2008 The Monitor. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections — or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here.
AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica.
