Diana Atwine, Permanent Secretary at the Uganda Ministry of Health, confirmed the Kampala index case as imported on Thursday 14 May1. A 59-year-old Congolese man was admitted to Kibuli Muslim Hospital on Monday 11 May and died on Thursday 14 May. "This is an imported case from DRC. The country has not yet confirmed a local case," Atwine said. A second Kampala case was subsequently confirmed in the Sunday WHO declaration. At least 25 contacts are under monitoring across Kampala and the Kasese border area, per the Africa CDC 16 May coordination call2.
A mobile laboratory has been deployed to Bwera Hospital in Kasese district on the DRC border, per WHO AFRO3. The Kasese deployment shortens the confirmation window for suspected cases arriving across the Ituri frontier from the several days needed to route samples to Kampala to the same-day turnaround INRB has been running inside DRC. Uganda has activated border screening at western entry points and along transit routes between Kasese and Kampala. The cross-border surveillance corridor with South Sudan is being expanded in parallel; South Sudan shares a 600-kilometre border with Uganda's northwest and was named in Africa CDC's 15 May grouping of at-risk states alongside DRC and Uganda.
Uganda's operational precedent is its own 2022 Sudan ebolavirus outbreak, in which 142 confirmed cases were contained in 113 days through contact tracing alone, without any licensed vaccine. Sudan ebolavirus has no Ervebo cross-protection in trial data, just as Bundibugyo has none. That 2022 containment, accomplished without a vaccine ring, is the closest operational template for what Kampala is now attempting. Atwine ran the senior coordination layer in 2022 and is running it again. The differences from 2022 are upstream: the ARILAC network gives Africa CDC a direct line into Uganda's border surveillance at greater institutional depth than three years ago, while the federal-CDC layer that supplied 2018 Equateur with embedded staff is no longer available in the same form.
