Ebola death toll rises to 43 in Uganda

GENEVA, Switzerland (Reuters) -- The World Health Organization said on Monday the death toll in Uganda from a disease identified as Ebola fever had risen to 43, according to provisional data. The organization expects the number of cases to rise.

But the U.N. health agency said there was no need for travel restrictions to and from the east African country to contain the disease, which spreads via direct contact with blood or bodily fluids of infected people and kills 50 percent to 90 percent of victims.

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Mike Ryan, WHO disease outbreak coordinator, is flying to Uganda on Monday to head the agency's emergency response team. Ryan told Reuters that 43 people were reported dead in a total of 63 cases in the outbreak in northern Uganda's Gulu district.

"These are provisional figures,and we are waiting for the officially confirmed figures from the Ugandan government," he said.

The figure is up from 33 dead reported by local officials in Uganda, including 10 in an Italian-sponsored Roman Catholic mission hospital. The other deaths were in villages around Gulu.

Ryan said WHO expected the number of cases to climb but could not say whether the outbreak appeared to be as bad as one that killed 245 people in the Congolese town of Kikwit in 1995.

"We're early in the outbreak. We expect more cases," Ryan said. "It is a very serious outbreak. Ebola kills its victims very quickly. We're taking this outbreak very seriously."

The Geneva-based WHO says Ebola fever has claimed 793 lives in nearly 1,100 documented cases since the virus was first discovered in 1976 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo,where an epidemic killed more than 270 people.

The exact origin of the virus or how and why it flares up is unknown. Its symptoms include sudden onset of fever, weakness, headache, muscle ache, abdominal pain and sore throat, followed by vomiting, diarrhea, and internal and external bleeding.

Francis Omaswa, Uganda's director general of health services, said in the capital, Kampala, that there were 63 cases reported so far in the outbreak, which Health Minister Crispus Kiyonga has said was confirmed by laboratory tests to be Ebola fever.

Ryan said a lack of security in the area and poor health services were complicating the response to the outbreak.

But he said WHO advised against restrictions in flights and other travel to and from the region and Uganda.

"Travel restrictions would be inappropriate because the disease is in a very remote part of Uganda and it spreads with direct contact with bodily fluids, not by sitting next to an ill person on a plane," he said.

"Cordoning off an area does not work in situations like this," Ryan said. "Travel restrictions will have no impact on the outbreak apart from putting pressure on Uganda's economy."

As for transporting bleeding passengers, he said airlines would apply their normal procedures for flying sick people.

WHO flew epidemiological experts to the area over the weekend. Ryan said protective equipment for health staff was also sent.

Hundreds of Ugandan soldiers back from war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo have passed through Gulu in recent months, causing media speculation they may have brought the virus. But army spokesman Phinehas Katirima said no soldiers had the virus.

Since 1976, Ebola outbreaks have been reported in Gabon, Sudan, Liberia and Ivory Coast with individual cases of infection reported in Britain, where a laboratory worker was infected by a contaminated needle in 1976.

The latest outbreak is the first time Ebola has struck in Uganda, although an outbreak of Marburg fever, which has similar characteristics, killed 19 people there in 1976.

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