A man has died of Ebola about 150 miles away from the epicentre of the outbreak in Uganda, underscoring how quickly cases are spreading.
A 45-year-old man died in the Jinja district in eastern Uganda near the source of the Nile, the country’s health minister, Dr Jane Ruth Aceng, said on Sunday.
It is the first time the outbreak has spread to a new region from the epicentre of the outbreak in central Uganda, where cases have been confined to so far.
Dr Aceng said that the man was probably infected by his brother, who had travelled from the capital Kampala to Jinja earlier this month.
The brother was sick for ten days before dying, during which time he probably infected the most recent victim.
It is unclear how many other people he could have infected during this time but the news raises serious questions about the effectiveness of Uganda’s contact tracers.
It comes after The Telegraph reported leaked Ministry of Health modelling last week showing that there will be 500 fatalities by late April, making this outbreak one of the deadliest ever.
Since then, MoH officials have denied that they have ever seen the modelling and described the figures as “alarmist”.
But officials have refused to give the ‘real’ modelling figures to reporters. One source said they had seen the government using the same document for internal presentations with the projection statistics page removed.
There have been increasing signs that the mistakes of secrecy and prevarication which characterised the early days of the coronavirus pandemic in Wuhan are being repeated in Uganda.
At least 136 cases and 53 deaths have been confirmed since the hemorrhagic fever was detected in mid-September.
The disease has spread across nine districts, including the capital Kampala – an international hub which is home to roughly two million people.
The virus 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.
The virus leaves its victims vomiting blood and generally kills about half of those infected.
