Ebola tests are positive for three people in Uganda hospital

Three people in an isolation unit of Uganda’s main hospital have tested positive for Ebola, the country’s health minister said on Saturday.

“Yesterday … three individuals from among the 60 in our Mulago isolation facility tested positive for Ebola,” Jane Ruth Aceng said on Twitter.

“They will be transferred to the Entebbe Isolation for treatment Unit since the Mulago Unit still has 58 contacts under quarantine,” she said, referring to a second facility 41 km away.

Mulago is in Uganda’s capital Kampala. Friday’s confirmed cases would be the first known transmission of the virus in the city, coming on the same day the information ministry said the country’s Ebola outbreak was coming under control and was expected to be over by the end of the year.

A government statement on Friday evening said the outbreak had infected 65 people and killed 27. It was not clear if the numbers included the three new Kampala cases.

The government has introduced a three-week lockdown around the Mubende and Kassanda districts in central Uganda, the epicentre of the outbreak of the Sudan variant of the Ebola virus.

The measures include an overnight curfew, restrictions on movement and the closure of places of worship and entertainment.

Aceng said the three infected people had been in contact with a patient from Kassanda who had died in Mulago.

The government said last week two other cases of Ebola confirmed in Kampala had come from Mubende and were regarded as originating there, not the capital.