Ministry declares country Ebola-free

Dr Sam Okware, head of the task force on Ebola at the Ugandan Ministry of Health, on Tuesday declared the country free of the viral haemorrhagic fever after two complete cycles of the incubation period passed without a new infection being reported. “There are no cases anywhere in the country and we are assured there is no more epidemic,” Okware told the BBC. The country’s first outbreak of Ebola in the northern Gulu district was confirmed on 15 October by the National Institute of Virology in Johannesburg, South Africa. The earliest presumed cases were on 30 August 2000 and the last case was on 9 January 2001, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO). Uganda’s success in containing the epidemic was due to quick tracing, isolation and containment procedures, and public education programmes through the combined efforts of the government, international agencies and local communities, according to WHO. In a ceremony in Gulu on Tuesday to mark the official end of the outbreak, government officials pledged to build on the expertise Uganda has gained through tackling the epidemic in order to mitigate any future incidences, the BBC reported. This was the third outbreak associated with the Ebola-Sudan virus strain and - like the first, in south Sudan and Zaire in 1976, and the second in the same locations in 1979 - had a case fatality rate of approximately 50 percent. [for a detailed report on the Uganda outbreak, go to: http://www.who.int/disease-outbreak-news/n2001/february/9afebruary2001.html]