Tue, August 21, 2012
KAMPALA, Aug. 20 (Xinhua) -- Uganda's ministry of health is to send a team of medical experts to neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to help contain the deadly Ebola hemorrhagic which is reported to have killed one person, local media said here on Monday.
Asuman Lukwago, permanent secretary ministry of health was quoted by state owned New Vision daily saying that the team will also help to prevent the disease from spreading to Uganda which is just emerging from an Ebola outbreak that has killed 16 people.
"We are just coming out of battling Ebola. We have to take all the measures, including the possibility of sending a team there to help them stop it and ensuring that it does not spill over here," said he said..
"We usually cooperate with our neighbors as well as the international organizations when such outbreaks happen," he added.
Medecins Sans Frontieres, an international medical humanitarian organization, on Friday said that the deadly disease had broken out in Isiro, a busy town in DRC's Oriental Province, which shares a border with Uganda.
It said that the outbreak had killed one person and believed to have infected three others over the past one week.
However, the strain of the deadly fever in northeastern DRC is different to the one reported in Uganda's mid-western district of Kibaale last month.
According to experts, the central African country's health system is permanent stretched, which could make preventing the disease from spreading from the town, a provincial transit point, a challenge.Uganda's ministry of health late last week said that the recent outbreak of the deadly Ebola hemorrhagic fever that left 16 people dead in the mid western Ugandan district of Kibaale has been contained.
The ministry in a statement issued here on Aug. 17 said that since Aug. 3 no new case has been confirmed signaling the end of the outbreak since the incubation period of the viral disease is between 2-21 days.
The Ebola virus is highly contagious and causes a range of symptoms including fever, vomiting, diarrhea, generalized pain or malaise and in many cases internal and external bleeding.
The fatality rate of the disease varies from outbreak to outbreak between 25 percent and 90 percent, according to World Health Organization.
