Uganda has reported nine more Ebola cases in the country’s capital Kampala, bringing the total number of known infections to 14 in the last two days, Health Minister Jane Ruth Aceng said on Monday.
The outbreak began in September in a rural part of central Uganda. It spread earlier this month to Kampala, a city of more than 1.6 million people, by a man who had come from the Kassanda district to seek medical treatment but eventually died.
Seven of the nine who tested positive on Sunday are family members of the man who died and are from the Kampala neighbourhood of Masanafu, the health minister stated on social media.
She added that another is a health worker who treated the man and his wife in a private clinic.
Minister Aceng did not say whether the nine people that contracted Ebola had been isolated before they tested positive. The five previous cases in Kampala had been isolated at Mulago Hospital.
There have been 60 confirmed cases and 44 deaths in Uganda, since the start of the outbreak, according to the WHO. However, the country’s health ministry reported 75 confirmed cases and 28 deaths since the start of the outbreak.
The virus that is circulating in Uganda is the Sudan strain of Ebola, for which there is no proven vaccine, unlike the more common Zaire strain that spread during recent outbreaks in the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo.
Ebola generally kills about half of the people it infects and spreads through contact with the bodily fluids of an infected person. Its symptoms include intense weakness, muscle pain, headaches, sore throat, vomiting and diarrhoea.
