Uganda to send experts to DR Congo to contain deadly Ebola outbreak

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.

Tuesday, August 21, 2012

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.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 borderwith 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.