Dr. Henry G. Mwebesa the Director General of Health Services Ministry of Health has revealed that Kampala will not be placed under lockdown, despite of the increasing number of Ebola Patients.
Dr. Mwebesa said that the ministry will continue with its current strategy of evacuating contacts into quarantine.
“This remains unnegotiable because we have to continue being cautious whichever the situation,” he said
Mwebesa made these updates while speaking to journalists at the Media orientation on reporting the Ebola outbreak in Uganda held at Fairway Hotel in Kampala on Monday.
His remarks followed a tweet by Dr. Jane Ruth Aceng, who said that five more new cases of Ebola had been discovered in Kampala.
By Monday, the total number of confirmed cases in Kampala Metropolitan was 15 with 11 in Rubaga, 1 in Makindye, 1 in Nansana, and 2 in Seguku.
Dr. Mwebesa said that all the cases being discovered are imported, so there is no cause for alarm,
He for example pointed out the one case that infected 7 family members in Kampala came from Kasanda before the lockdown was imposed by the president on Saturday 15.


According to Mwebesa, a case that later passed on came from Kassanda to get treatment in the Masanafu Rubaga division and upon testing the results came out positive.
“When we came to identify that he had been with part of his family, we got the contacts, isolated them, and upon testing seven of them turned out positive which definitely confirms Kampala cases” Mwebesa added.
By October 23, Uganda had registered 90 cases of Ebola, of those 28 of them have so far passed on, over 1,000 are listed for follow up and 32 have recovered.
The training was organized by UNICEF in partnership with World Health Organization, the Ministry of Health and the African Center for Media Excellence organized.


Mwebesa noted that the training will equip 100 Journalists in Kampala with skills in reporting about Ebola objectively.
Similar training will be conducted in 8 country regions where a total of 240 Journalists 30 from each region will be trained.
“We are looking at training a target of 340 Journalists together,” he said
Ann Robens the Chief of Child survivors at UNICEF told Journalists that the two main transmissions of Ebola points are meeting infectious persons and also in burial.
She however urged them to spread the gospel of sanitizing, and hand washing as this can help to curb the spread of this killer disease.
Doctor Ivan Kimuli the one in charge of case management at WHO also tipped journalists and warned Journalists to stop sensational reporting and seek the truth from scientists before putting out half-baked information.
Districts of Kassanda and Mubende remain the epicenters of Ebola currently and this was the reason president Museveni imposed a curfew and a lockdown on them.
