Gov’t places over 600 Ebola contacts on No-fly list as cases rise

Kampala, Uganda | URN | The Ministry of Health says over six hundred contacts of the fifteen Ebola Bundibugyo virus-positive cases in Uganda have been placed under a No-fly list.

The Director of Public Health, Dr Daniel Kyabayinze, told journalists that the authorities had distributed details of all those under follow-up to agencies responsible for travel to help curb possible transmission of the disease.

On Tuesday, Uganda recorded six newly confirmed cases, raising the total number of those infected in the outbreak first announced on 15th May 2026 to fifteen. The majority of the confirmed cases are foreigners, in addition to health workers who attended to them.

By Tuesday, up to 668 contacts of these people were under follow-up, where some were in quarantine facilities and yet others were under self -isolation with close monitoring by the ministry.

Kyabayinze said all contacts are followed up for twenty-one days, and those found negative are released back to the community, where, thereafter, the no-fly status on them is lifted.

Already, he said, some of the contacts of the very first confirmed cases in the country had been discharged. In addition, two people who tested positive have since cleared the virus and were also discharged.

While the Bundibugyo virus strain has a high fatality rate of up to forty per cent, experts say Uganda is having the outbreak under control, considering that they have managed to identify most of the contacts and those testing positive are immediately initiated on supportive treatment.

Prof Pontaino Kaleebu, the Executive Director of the Uganda Virus Institute, in an interview with URN, said the country intervened on time when they first discovered the virus had been imported here.

He urged calm, saying that the fact that contacts are known and the measures for prevention and control are effective, all Ugandans need to stay safe is the right information.

However, despite this fact, authorities have had to put up a fight against misinformation in the outbreak, viral alarmist and unsubstantiated messages about hospital and school closures.

Kyabayinze urged the public to only rely on information received through official government channels.

Dr Atek Kagirita, the Deputy Incident Commander in charge of such public health emergencies, explained that there have also been misconceptions that the current outbreak started in Uganda, and yet it started in the Neighboring DRC, where it has so far made up to  280 people confirmed to be sickened by the virus and claimed 42 lives.

While this Ebola strain was first identified in Uganda in 2007, he says they have done genomic sequencing and established that the current outbreak that started in Ituri Province in Congo has a very distant relationship with the strain that has circulated in Uganda before.