By JONATHAN KAMOGA

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Uganda will now go for vaccines under trial to protect the people from Ebola virus, which broke out in the central district of Mubende and has spread to more five districts.

According to Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni, about 470 doses will be flown from the UK and the US. President Museveni, who addressed the country on the disease on Wednesday evening, said the doses should specifically be used by medical workers, who are dealing with the cases every day.

So far, four of about 20 people who have died of Ebola are medical workers, while five others and about 20 patients have been discharged after fully recovering from the disease.

“Those vaccines, I think, should go to the health workers first. Health workers should be vaccinated because they are the ones who are at the front line,” President Museveni said.

The World Health Organisation said the vaccines for the Sudan strain of Ebola, will be brought in the country next week. Uganda’s Health Minister Dr Jane Ruth Aceng, said the country is expecting two different types of vaccines.

Both vaccines, according to the WHO, have not had the regulatory and ethical approvals and are in clinical trials. She says one is manufactured in Oxford, while the other, Sabin, is manufactured in the US.

“We are getting small doses, but the manufacturers are quickly manufacturing more,” she said.

The Oxford vaccine, according to the Health ministry, has already been tested on 40 people in Tanzania and 26 in the United Kingdom.

During a regional ministerial meeting in Kampala, attended by health ministers from 11 countries on Wednesday, the countries agreed to work together to fight the disease from spreading to their countries.

According to the WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the focus is on how to control the spread to countries.

“WHO is fully committed to supporting Uganda together with our partners to save lives and end this outbreak,” Mr Ghebreyesus told the meeting via a video message.

Dr Ahmed Ogwell Ouma, the acting director-general for the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, called for strengthening of institutions to handle emergencies.

President Museveni warned that all contacts to confirmed cases that intentionally become elusive will be arrested. Many suspected contacts and even sick people have run away from their homes or isolation centres. A patient who died at a hospital in Kampala, the only case reported in the capital so far, had escaped from an isolation centre. When his condition worsened, he travelled the over 150km from Mubende to Kampala for treatment without detection from health monitoring teams currently in the area.

He went to Kiruddu Hospital in a Kampala suburb, but died less than 12 hours after admission.

While the president maintained that the country has the capacity to control this epidemic, there have been questions surrounding the preparedness of the government mainly in major hospitals, access to protective gear for medical workers, rapid testing and contact tracing.

The Uganda Medical Association has advised its members to stay away from gazetted isolation and treatment centres if they are not provided with basic protection gear.

The WHO said that high-level political commitment and support, along with regular transnational communication, joint surveillance activities and real-time information sharing were all essential to prevent and interrupt the spread of the disease.