Uganda battles new Ebola outbreak

A month after an Ebola outbreak struck Uganda in September 2022, Edward Kayiwa began feeling unwell: headaches, fever and muscle pain.

He knew something was wrong, and that he had two options – go to a hospital or believe the rumours that were circulating in his community and stay home.

“I knew I was infected, but the fear was overwhelming,” the 32-year-old truck driver told Al Jazeera about the epidemic that lasted four months and killed 55 people.

His fear stemmed from conspiracy theories that patients treated in the community were being injected with substances that killed them instantly. It took him two days to realise no one was being killed and some were even recovering. After that, “I personally called an ambulance to pick me up,” he says.

The 2022 health crisis was Uganda’s seventh outbreak of Ebola – a highly infectious hemorrhagic disease – and its fifth of the Sudan virus (SVD) strain, which has a more than 40 percent fatality rate.

Kayiwa – one of 142 confirmed cases that time – was lucky to survive, though many others were not.

Now, just two years later, on January 30, 2025, Uganda announced its latest Sudan Ebola outbreak. The Ministry of Health identified a 32-year-old male nurse who had died as the first documented case. He was an employee at Mulago National Referral Hospital, the country’s top medical facility.

The nurse initially developed fever-like symptoms and sought treatment at two health facilities in the greater Kampala area and another in eastern Uganda, near the Kenyan border.

While there is no approved vaccine for the Sudan Ebola strain, a vaccine for the Zaire Ebola strain – which caused the 2013-2016 West Africa epidemic that killed more than 11,000 people – was developed and approved in 2022. The Zaire strain, which was first discovered in 1976 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (then known as Zaire), is the most lethal of the four ebolaviruses in existence.

“In the absence of licensed vaccines and therapeutics for the prevention and treatment of SVD, the risk of potential serious public health impact is high,” the World Health Organization (WHO) said about the current outbreak in Uganda.

According to the WHO, Ebola symptoms appear between two and 21 days after infection, and can include fever, severe headache, muscle pain, fatigue, abdominal pain, diarrhoea, vomiting, and bleeding from the nose, gums, ears and eyes.

As it is highly infectious, patients have to be isolated and treated. Medical workers handling Ebola patients are also required to wear full personal protective equipment, adhere to strict hygiene protocols, and handle dead bodies safely to avoid infection.

While the disease itself is a huge challenge for the continent, this is compounded by other stumbling blocks, experts say, including traditional beliefs, witchcraft, and conspiracy theories that often impede Ebola treatment and control.

In Uganda, the Ministry of Health said the nurse who died last month had visited a traditional healer. His relatives also reportedly attempted to exhume his body to rebury it in accordance with Muslim faith dictates. However, this poses serious risks as bodies can still be infectious for a period after death.

When a friend of Kayiwa’s contracted Ebola in 2022 before he did, they believed he had been bewitched, and their first option was to take him to traditional healers. They also thought he was suffering from an illness known locally as “Ettalo”, which causes unexplained pain, and tried local herbal medicine to cure it.

Deeper conspiracy theories also prevailed during the 2022 outbreak, which started in Mubende District, an area about 160km (100 miles) from Kampala famous for artisanal gold mining.

“When we first heard about the outbreak, it was linked to the Kassanda-Mubende gold mines,” Kayiwa says. “Many people, including myself, thought it was a plot by officials to drive out the artisanal miners and take over the mining areas.”

Source: BBC