At least 50 die after Ebola outbreak in Uganda

A team of doctors from the World Health Organisation is due to arrive today in northern Uganda, where an outbreak of the rare Ebola fever was confirmed over the weekend. It is understood to have killed at least 50 people, including three medical staff.

A team of doctors from the World Health Organisation is due to arrive today in northern Uganda, where an outbreak of the rare Ebola fever was confirmed over the weekend. It is understood to have killed at least 50 people, including three medical staff.

The highly contagious haemorrhagic fever has emerged for the first time in Gulu, northern Uganda, the health ministry said yesterday.

The virus, which has not been recorded in Africa for three years, causes 90 per cent of its victims to bleed to death within two weeks, through the eyes, nose and ears. Symptoms include fever and muscle pains.

Doctors in Gulu district, 200 miles from the capital, Kampala, said 62 people were known to have contracted the disease but that cases in remote villages may not have been recorded.

The health ministry said it did not know where the virus, which spreads through body fluids and faeces in open sewers, had come from.

There is speculation that it may have reached Uganda with soldiers returning from the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In the past three months hundreds of Ugandan soldiers have passed through Gulu, prompting reports in the media that they may have brought the virus with them. An army spokesman said no soldiers had the virus.

The WHO, which already has two experts in situ, worked with the health ministry at the weekend to move protective gear to Gulu. An epidemiological surveillance team is setting up isolation wards to prevent more medical staff from contracting Ebola from patients they are treating.

Matthew Lukwiya, a doctor treating victims at Lacor hospital in Gulu, said families accompanying patients were talking about many more relatives being ill. "Eighty per cent of those who come in tell you that they have lost people in their families, five or six for every one that comes in."

In the most recent big outbreak Ebola killed 245 in the Democratic Republic of Congo town of Kikwit in 1995. Uganda is not known to have had an outbreak, though the related Marburg virus occurs there.

Ebola was named after a river in the Democratic Republic of Congo where it was first recorded in nearby villages in 1976. The last recorded outbreak was in Gabon in February 1997, which killed 10 people. In 1976 in Britain a laboratory worker contracted the virus from a needle.