New Strain of Ebola Hits
Ebola spreads in western Uganda: officials
AFP | December 3, 2007
Three people with suspected Ebola were admitted to hospital Monday in western Uganda, where the virus has killed 18 people and is spreading from village to village, government officials said.
"Three cases were admitted today, bringing the total to 64," said Samuel Kazinga, the district commissioner for Bundibugyo, the epicentre of the new outbreak.
With five experts from the Atlanta-based Centre for Disease Control (CDC) expected to arrive on Tuesday, efforts to isolate and intern patients in Bundibugyo, near the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), appeared to suffer setbacks.
"Some people refuse to come out of their home to seek treatment, but our social mobilisation team is trying to convince them to come out," Kazinga said, describing the phenomenon as "psychological."
CDC Special Pathogens Branch chief Thomas Ksiazek said it was not yet clear whether the Ebola virus causing the current outbreak was more or less deadly than the previously known strains.
"There is very little information about the eventual outcome in the [cases] that have been confirmed so far," Ksiazek was quoted as telling The Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper.
Ksiazek's colleague, CDC epidemiologist Eileen Farnon, part of the team headed to Bundibugyo, explained the key issue is to collect information on the effects of the disease that has no cure.
"The most important consideration is to have a sense of what's been going on with the outbreak: How many people are affected, where and when the outbreak is moving, and trying to stop transmission," Farnon told the paper.
A health ministry team was in the western province pleading with villagers not to touch sick patients and isolate them.
Meanwhile, a patient who had been isolated in neighbouring Port Portale district died, but his sample alongside with another of patient who died in the southern Mbarara region were still lying in Uganda's Virus Research Institute awaiting screening.
A health ministry official said more pathogen experts were expected later this week.
"By Thursday, we shall have 30 international health experts on the ground and by the end of the week, we expect more experienced Ugandan doctors there," said the official.
Spread primarily by blood contact, Ebola was identified last week by the CDC pathogen branch after simmering unnoticed in the impoverished region since September.
The World Health Organisation said the new outbreak was a previously unknown strain that provokes high fever before killing its victims without much blood haemorrhage.
This is unlike the known Ebola subtypes, which rapture blood vessels, killing their patients by shock after non-stop bleeding through body orifices, doctors said.
The disease killed at least 170 people in northern Uganda in 2000.
The Ebola virus has remained rare and mystifying since it was first discovered in DR Congo and Sudan in 1976 and other outbreaks have since hit Ivory Coast and Gabon.
Experts have said the disease, which strikes with an initial ferocity but fades away in months, is usually containable because it kills its victims faster that it can spread to new ones.
The virulence of the disease slashes its chances of multiplying and spreading further, they say.
