Uganda's health ministry yesterday reported that Ebola has spread to Jinja district in the southeastern part of the country (see Google Maps image below).
On Twitter yesterday, the country's health minister Jane Ruth Aceng Ocero, MBChB, MPH, said the confirmed case in Jinja involves a 45-year-old man who died at his home on Nov 10 and was buried on Nov 12. Health workers from a clinic where he sought care earlier obtained a sample from the man on the day he died.
She said the man is a contact of a suspected case, his brother who traveled to Jinja where he was sick for 10 days and died on Nov 3. Ocero said the brother is listed as a suspected fatal case and is part of a cluster from Rubaga, which is in the Kampala area.
Ebola deaths that occur in community settings pose a high risk of further spread, because virus levels are typically at their highest when people are sickest and because contacts don’t typically have access to protective equipment.
Over the past few days, the country also reported another new case, involving a 17-year-old girl from Kassanda district, and another death in an earlier confirmed patient in Mubende district.
The outbreak total as of Nov 12 is 139 confirmed cases, 55 of them fatal, from nine districts, according to an update posted on the World Health Organization (WHO) Uganda office website. Also, there are least 21 suspected cases, all of them fatal. The outbreak, which began in September, involves the less common Sudan Ebola strain.