Uganda confirms six more Ebola cases as outbreak reaches 15

Health authorities in Uganda are facing the outbreak-control test that matters most: whether new Ebola cases are still tied to known contacts, or whether the virus is slipping beyond surveillance. The latest update points to both sides of that question. The Ministry of Health confirmed six additional cases on June 2, bringing the country’s total confirmed infections to 15, and said the new patients were found among contacts of previously confirmed cases.

That detail suggests contact tracing is reaching the right people, but it also shows the chain of transmission is still active. The ministry said two patients had been discharged from hospital, 12 remained admitted and one patient had died. In an Ebola outbreak, each confirmed case forces investigators to map exposure, isolate contacts and determine whether infection is spreading through households, health facilities or other community settings. The fact that the new cases emerged from among monitored contacts means the response is detecting disease, but it does not yet show the outbreak has been contained.

The outbreak involves the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola, which the World Health Organization said has no licensed vaccine or specific therapeutics. On May 17, the WHO director-general determined that the outbreak in Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo constituted a public health emergency of international concern. The agency has said response measures include rapid response teams, surveillance, laboratory confirmation, infection prevention and control, treatment centers and community engagement.

Uganda’s latest numbers also sit inside a wider regional emergency. The WHO’s May 29 update said the outbreak had reached 134 confirmed cases across Uganda and the DRC, including nine in Uganda at that point, with 18 deaths among confirmed cases. The agency said transmission was continuing across borders and that contact tracing and follow-up remained challenging. The National Institute for Communicable Diseases in South Africa said Uganda’s outbreak was initially linked to an imported case from the DRC, and that a second laboratory-confirmed imported case was reported in Kampala on May 16.

Those early imported cases underscored the risk that the outbreak could seed new chains in urban areas even as health teams expanded their response. The current rise to 15 confirmed infections shows Uganda’s surveillance system is still finding cases, but it also shows how quickly a relatively small cluster can change the scale of the response when Ebola is moving through contacts already being watched.