Health Minister Dr Jane Ruth Aceng hands over recovery certificates to survivors. PHOTO URN
KAMPALA, UGANDA | THE INDEPENDENT | The Ministry of Health has discharged all eight patients who had tested positive for Ebola. The patients were in contact with the health worker who succumbed to the viral hemorrhagic fever last month.
While being discharged on Tuesday, Ezra Byegarazo a Clinical Officer at Saidina Abubakar Islamic Hospital who was attending to the deceased index case said he didn’t test positive for the virus until eleven days later. He also revealed that they had been told they would be followed up for one year but worried that this exercise may turn into coercion especially if follow-up teams fail to appreciate that the majority are employed and may not always avail themselves as needed.
Byegarazo was speaking shortly after Health Minister Dr Jane Ruth Aceng declared that the country currently has no active case of the Ebola Sudan disease as all the seven that had been admitted at Mulago National Referral and one case that was in Mbale hospital had been discharged.
Aceng added that while there are no positive cases, the outbreak declared on January 30th is not yet over as they still have over a hundred contacts who have not yet completed their 21 days of follow-up. The Ministry had listed 265 contacts who were put under quarantine at various facilities in Jinja, Kampala and Mbale districts but ninety-one had completed their 21 days from exposure to a positive case on Monday.
Meanwhile, when asked whether experts had finally established what the source of the current outbreak was, Col Dr Henry Kyobe, the Incident Commander said that they had not yet found concrete evidence but added that the index case was most likely infected from the Kampala Metropolitan areas as he had been to Kampala and Wakiso districts only in the period of exposure.
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