By MICHAEL WAKABI

A HEALTH notice to Ugandans living on the Congolese frontier to be on the lookout for people with symptoms of the deadly Ebola virus came amid reports, denied by the government, that at least one person had succumbed to it.

Medical personnel have been posted to two monitoring posts close to the border, one in Arua and the other in Nebbi, to carry out continuous surveillance inside Uganda. Arua and Nebbi are busy commercial centres on the Uganda-Congo-Sudan frontier.

Reacting to media reports that a Ugandan soldier had succumbed to the Ebola virus, the Director of Health Services, Professor Francis Omaswa, said last week that tests carried out on the dead soldier showed no Ebola symptoms.

The denials came as Ugandan health authorities awaited results of tests on blood and tissue samples from suspected cases of haemorrhagic fever in the eastern DRC on Monday. Taken from Durba, where a new outbreak was reported a fortnight ago, the nine samples were flown to South Africa's National Institute of Virology last Wednesday. Results from the tests were expected late last Friday.

Investigators have been seeking to establish whether the recent cases are a continuation of earlier outbreaks in May, or are the result of a completely new and independent outbreak.

More than 60 cases were reported between November 1998 and May this year but the presence of the Marburg virus was confirmed in only five of those cases. Outbreaks between January and April died out on their own before another outbreak in May.

Related to the Ebola virus, Marburg kills by indiscriminately attacking human cells, causing massive bleeding throughout the body. The virus is indigenous to Central Africa and appears in parts of Congo, Uganda and western Kenya. Like Ebola, the animal host of Marburg is unknown. Investigations of a cave in western Kenya, following the infection of two men who had visited the site, yielded no positive result.

The onset of the disease is sudden and is often marked by fever, chills and headache, after an incubation period of five to 10 days. People especially at risk of catching Marburg are those who have close contact with infected human and non-human primates, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO).

The origins of the Ebola virus, named after a river in Congo, are unknown although it is believed to be animal-borne. After the first victim is infected, the disease spreads through contact with the secretions of that person. Common symptoms of Ebola are high fever, headache, muscle aches, stomach pain, fatigue, vomiting of blood and blood diarrhoea.

Yet, Ugandan government officials play down the latest campaign. "It is a continuous exercise," said Dr Sam Okware, Commissioner for Health Services in the Ugandan Ministry of Health and a member of the monitoring task force.

"We have been sending samples for testing since May and they have been negative up to the end of August. There is no problem." At its meeting last Friday, the task force considered the latest surveillance reports and the level of preparedness to cope with a possible outbreak.

The task force, comprising officials from the health and defence ministries, the World Health Organisation as well as the prisons department, has been studying developments in the eastern DRC and planning contingency measures to prevent outbreaks in Uganda.

A team that went out to the field on Monday last week looked at such aspects as state of readiness of border stations, the level of awareness among border populations and availability of essential supplies, such as protective wear. No suspected cases were reported.

The officials stress, however, that Uganda is not in immediate danger of an outbreak of haemorrhagic fever in spite of recent suspected cases in the Durba area of the eastern DRC where a new outbreak of the disease was reported two weeks ago.

According to a report by the United Nations regional information agency, IRIN, which has a strong presence in the Great Lakes, there were up to 15 suspected cases of the fever since the main outbreak ended in May.

The new cases were reported in the Durba area between June and August but there has been no laboratory confirmation of haemorrhagic fever, IRIN said, quoting officials of the medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF).

"Last week's samples were collected from among nine suspected cases identified between end July and end August, of whom four died," the IRIN release said.

The new cases fit the case definition of viral haemorrhagic fever although MSF warned that there were other viruses that could give rise to similar symptoms.

Additional reporting by A. Mutumba Lule.

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