Witchdoctors told to stop treating Ebola
Uganda’s president has ordered witchdoctors to stop seeing patients as part of measures to halt the spread of Ebola, which has reached the densely populated capital.
President Yoweri Museveni also directed the security forces to arrest those suspected of contracting the haemorrhagic fever if they refused to go into isolation. The first confirmed case in Kampala, a city of 3.6 million people, was a 45-year-old man who had fled isolation in his village last month where half a dozen relatives had died of Ebola. He had visited a traditional healer before being admitted to a hospital in the capital where he died.
‘‘Witchdoctors, traditionalists and herbalists should not accept sick people now. Suspend what you are doing,’’ the autocratic Museveni, 78, said in a televised address on Thursday.
The World Health Organisation has warned of a ‘‘high’’ risk of the virus being taken by traders across Uganda’s busy borders. Vaccine trials for the Sudan variant could begin in weeks. America was the first to signal international alarm about the outbreak last week by announcing it would screen all arrivals from Uganda.
Devi Sridhar, professor of global public health at Edinburgh University, called for Britain to take precautions. ‘‘Given #Ebola has reached Kampala – which has a major international airport – it would be good if UK followed US in screening passengers from Uganda – checks at airports and monitoring for 21 days,’’ she tweeted. The Sudan variant of the virus is rare. Recent outbreaks of the more common Zaire variation of Ebola have been controlled in the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo with vaccines. A vaccine for the Sudan strain has been tested in healthy volunteers, but trials will now begin in Uganda involving health workers and contacts of the infected.
Uganda’s national Ebola taskforce said it feared the virus may have been spreading for weeks, with mysterious deaths being blamed on witchcraft before the first confirmed case on September 20.
Museveni said in his address: ‘‘There is no witchcraft here. Ebola is a disease. The communities in the affected areas should know Ebola is deadly and spread through contacts with the affected person.’’
The WHO said there had been 54 confirmed cases and 19 deaths, including four health workers, since the first confirmed case in the central district of Mubende. Twenty other deaths are considered ‘‘probable’’ Ebola cases.