A total of 639 cuttings were taken, 371 (58%) of which came from the New Vision and 268 (42%) from the Monitor. This represented a mean of 2.7 and 1.9 cuttings per day respectively. The cuttings included 539 articles, 38 letters to the Editor, 34 photographs (independent of an accompanying article), 15 editorials and commentaries and 13 cartoons. There were two peaks in coverage by the two newspapers. The first came in Week 2, by when the potential seriousness of the outbreak had been fully recognised – 77 cuttings were taken. The second, larger peak was in Week 9, following the death from Ebola of the man who had first alerted the Ministry of Health about the outbreak, Dr Matthew Lukwiya, Medical Superintendent of Lacor Hospital – 102 cuttings were taken. Otherwise, there was a consistent and gradual decline in coverage from Week 2 onwards. Some of the major events of the outbreak are presented in Figure 2, in order to give a broad overview of the story as it unfolded. More of the day-to-day detail is given in Additional file 1: Annex 1, which lists the headlines of each of the 88 newspaper articles quoted in the text below.

Figure 2 Timeline showing some of the major events from the Ugandan Ebola outbreak. Full size image

Because it was not always possible to establish from the reports exactly when a given incident had taken place, the day numbers below refer to the day on which the particular stories were published. The first report of the disease was published in the New Vision on October 13, and this is taken as the reference point, or Day 1.

Responses in the affected communities

Gulu: Epicentre of the outbreak

At the time of the outbreak, Gulu district had been at the centre of a brutal rebel insurgency by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) for 13 years, ongoing since 1987. The community’s response to Ebola there should be seen in this context. Just three days before the Ebola outbreak was officially announced, for example, 11 people were killed and over 50 injured in three separate attacks on Gulu town during Independence Day celebrations. During the outbreak itself, health workers and scouts travelling to affected villages were obliged to travel in Uganda People’s Defence Force (UPDF) armoured personnel carriers in order to avoid the rebels. One report from Day 7 described the visit of a medical team under heavy military escort to five patients trapped at their homes. UPDF protection was not, however, always a guarantee of safety. One Ebola surveillance scout was killed during an attack on Day 31.

Gulu bore the brunt of Uganda’s Ebola epidemic, with 393 cases (92% of the total) and 203 deaths [13]. The Medical Superintendent at Gulu hospital described the situation as “very wild” on Day 2, adding that two suspected cases had fled the hospital. Four days later, mourners at the funeral of an Ebola victim stripped themselves naked and left their clothes for fear of carrying the virus home with them, to which the Minister of Health responded, “sometimes the response is extreme, but it shows that people are taking the message.” Unfortunately, a number of people took the wrong message, drinking and bathing in ‘Jik’ bleach (which was heavily promoted throughout the epidemic as an effective disinfectant against the virus) “in a desperate attempt to rid themselves of Ebola”.

Relations between people within the community rapidly deteriorated as the infection spread. A reporter in Rwot-Obillo, one of the first affected villages, described “people eyeing each other suspiciously, suspecting everybody else to be a carrier of the killer virus”, while inhabitants of Gulu town were said to be “dispirited, suspicious and depressed”. People refused to shake hands, they avoided gatherings, markets and day schools were closed, and all visits to boarding schools were banned. One head teacher explained that “the teachers monitor the children very closely. We tell them to avoid touching each other. We also instruct them to play games where there is no body contact”.

On Day 19, Gulu district “erupted in wild shouting, jumping and running”, as a traditional Acholi ritual was performed, intended to “exorcise” their land of the virus. The procedure, known as ryemo gemo, is practiced every December 31 as a means of cleansing the area of disease before the New Year begins [12]; but this additional ryemo gemo ceremony – in which the participants “carried spears and ran around beating saucepans, basins, calabashes, and jerry cans” – was conducted in late October in the hope that their actions would chase Ebola across the Nile and away.

Meanwhile, some traditional healers had told people to tie banana fibres around their wrists as a means of avoiding Ebola. However, most healers had suspended curative work in the early stages of the outbreak, since a number of their colleagues had initially thought that they would be able to treat Ebola, but they had contracted the virus during their attempts and succumbed themselves. The Roman Catholic clergy responded by visiting many of the affected villages to tell people “to ignore such witchcraft”. As one priest said wearily, “because it is a time of fear, people resort to superstitious practices.”

Stigmatisation rapidly became a major issue, just as it had done in the Kikwit outbreak of 1995. On Day 5, Dr Lukwiya of Lacor Hospital said, “Once the names of the Ebola patients and the dead are made public, society stigmatises the relatives”. Considerable difficulties were also faced after the epidemic when trying to resettle the 190 survivors back into their communities, even though they had fully recovered. Returning home, many found that fearful neighbours had burned their blankets, clothes, beds, and in some cases even their huts. Others discovered that their spouses had fled, and they were completely shunned by their neighbours. People refused to buy from Ebola survivors, so that those who had previously worked in the markets found themselves without any means of support. However, a concerted education programme was launched which eventually ensured that survivors could once again join the community. As one woman said, “they burned all my things. I am left with nothing except the clothes I am wearing now. Even family members at first feared to mix with me, but I told them the doctors said it is OK. Now relatives have started coming back.”

Because traditional burial practices had been a major factor in initial amplification of the epidemic, the authorities were obliged to take over responsibility for burying the dead. Trained teams buried 138 of the victims in one cemetery just outside Gulu town, but the community as a whole was not able to properly mourn its dead until the day the epidemic was officially declared over, February 27 2001. Hundreds of relatives gathered at the cemetery on that day, many of them “sitting on the graves, crying and rolling on the ground, dust and pieces of dry grass stuck to their hair and clothes, even as the two bishops and a Muslim leader began prayers.”

Mbarara: A small, controlled outbreak within the army

The Mbarara outbreak struck only five individuals, of whom four died. Starting on Day 21, it took both the authorities and the public by surprise, since few travellers move directly between there and Gulu, over 500 km to the north, which was at that time the only other place suffering an outbreak. The first case was a UPDF Private at the barracks in Mbarara town, and the other four cases were either directly or indirectly connected to the army, which had the means to impose strict and immediate control measures. As a result, the outbreak remained within this small closed circle of colleagues, so community reaction never reached the same pitch as it did either in Gulu or Masindi (see below for discussion of events in Masindi). The outbreak was short-lived, with the fourth and final death taking place on Day 29.

There was, however, some anger over the choice of burial site for the victims. A Local Councillor said during a phone-in radio show that was reported in the Monitor: “Enough is enough. We reject being the Municipality’s garbage dump and we will attack the team if they bring another Ebola body here”. Listeners who subsequently phoned in expressed support for this position, and some residents of Mbarara Municipality also threatened to attack the University teaching hospital if another victim was buried in their area. The newspapers never reported how this issue was resolved. Other reported reaction in Mbarara town was limited to an increase in the price of Jik, from 1,500 to 2,000 Uganda shillings (US$0.85 to US$1.15) per bottle, people avoiding shaking hands and hugging, and poor business at hotels and kiosks. “I still have almost all the food and tea we have prepared for breakfast and lunch”, said one food vendor on Day 23. “We don’t think we shall open tomorrow”.

Masindi: An angry community response

Just as events were being brought under control in Mbarara, the epidemic appeared 130 km south of Gulu town, in Kigumba village, Masindi district. On Day 32, the death was reported of a woman who had initially been admitted with abdominal swelling at Lacor Hospital in Gulu, and who had “escaped” from there when she learned that the hospital was also treating Ebola patients. Unaccountably infected while at Lacor, she carried the virus home and then infected three of the close relatives who cared for her when she eventually fell ill. The four of them all died. As per local custom, their bodies were kept for three days before burial, and were ritually and communally washed. A senior member of the National Ebola Task Force bemoaned the fact that “they refused to go to hospital, and they did not allow anyone to go to their homes. Kigumba is a very complex area,” he added. “It has many nationalities, and it is very deprived, without facilities and infrastructure.”

A burial team at nearby Kiryandongo hospital was rapidly trained by experts brought down from Gulu, and ten graves were prepared. Because it lacked a reliable power supply, running water and communication facilities, Kiryandongo was established only as a ‘holding point’ for suspected cases. Confirmed cases were to be transferred to the much better equipped Masindi hospital, 50 km away in the district capital. Nonetheless, the preparations at Kiryandongo prompted 33 “panic-stricken” patients, admitted with other conditions, to flee back into the community. Meanwhile, an Ebola isolation ward with eight beds was established in Masindi, which required discharging all the patients from a TB ward, including several prisoners who were to continue receiving treatment in their cells.

The death toll gradually grew, and by Day 55, 12 people had died and a further 12 were still admitted. Serious problems in the community first arose with the people who lived near to the official Ebola burial site, three kilometres outside of Masindi town. “Hundreds of angry villagers” took to the streets on Day 56, and stormed the district headquarters in protest, forcing officials to seek an alternative site. Meanwhile, the Ebola burial team abandoned work due to extreme pressure from the community, leaving four bodies unburied in the hospital, which in turn prompted 100 patients in other wards to flee. Residents in some areas of town began refusing medical workers at Masindi hospital access to their own homes, some of which were attacked. This prompted a press release from the Bunyoro-Kitara kingdom – which traditionally leads the people of Masindi – calling for tolerance. “Relatives have turned against their brothers and sisters who work at Masindi and Kiryandongo hospitals,” it stated. “A deep division has been created in the population”.

This statement, and the high level meeting of traditional leaders that followed it, did not, however, bring an end to the vitriol. The Chairman of the District Task Force received death threats from people who blamed him for the death from Ebola of the hospital’s ambulance driver, who had been infected while transporting patients from Kiryandongo to Masindi. On Day 60, the Medical Superintendent of Masindi Hospital decided that he too was at risk, and he fled with his family to Kampala, Uganda’s capital city. That same evening, two members of a relief burial team that had just arrived in Masindi from Gulu were unceremoniously thrown out of their hotel and threatened with death.

The Minister of State for Local Government then stepped in, pointing out that the Penal Code would be invoked to deal with those who took the law into their own hands. “All those harassing our dedicated health workers in the fight against Ebola should be condemned with the contempt they deserve”, he stated. The government also sought to tackle the problem at source, by strengthening the isolation centre at Kiryandongo so that it could handle cases that emerged there, while Masindi hospital would take on cases from elsewhere in the district. As it happened, the outbreak in Masindi was almost over by this stage. The last of the 17 deaths reported in the district occurred just over a week later, on Day 70.

Responses throughout the country: Panic amid fears of divine retribution

There were numerous stories from throughout the country about reaction to the threat of Ebola. Forty-five false alarms were described in the newspapers (see Figure 1), arising out of a wide variety of conditions – dysentery, malaria, cholera, food poisoning, hypertension (which reportedly caused a nose bleed), gastro-enteritis, septic abortion, a gun shot wound, menstrual periods, excessive alcohol consumption, gingivitis, and haemorrhoids. The word “panic” accompanied 19 of these reports. In one case, the suspicious death of a man in a Kampala hospital sparked off a “stampede” in which workers and patients fled, while others were wheeled out of the ward or carried from their beds. Several people were reportedly injured during another chaotic scene in Jinja, when nurses “abandoned their desks and threw away their pens and writing pads”, while patients “scampered away” from the suspect individual. Meanwhile, a man in Iganga – 400 km away from the nearest confirmed case – barricaded himself and all his family inside their house with sufficient food and water to last until the outbreak ended, while bank clerks in Mbale started wearing latex gloves whenever they handled money.

Even petty criminal activity was affected, with pickpockets at a Kampala bus park shunning travellers who had just arrived either from Masindi or Gulu. Instead of approaching just anyone who looked like easy prey, the pickpockets sought first to establish where their target had come from. “They stand near the buses to make sure that the person they are going to steal from is not from Gulu or Masindi,” reported an anonymous source to the New Vision. Any pickpocket who accidentally came into contact with a passenger from an affected area was immediately “excommunicated” by his colleagues. One boy, for example, who had worked his hand into an old man’s bag when the latter informed him he was from Gulu, was “suspended from his group”.

Religion was for many people an important source of support, explanation and, they hoped, protection. On Day 29, over 300 Christian churches from throughout the country converged on a stadium in Kampala to pray for the end of the Ebola outbreak. Several priests took the opportunity to emphasise the need for people to follow the scriptures. As one of them said, “whenever there is famine, an epidemic or endless wars, the Bible says it is coming from God on a particular people or nation for sins committed”. This theme of divine retribution was echoed by the leader of the Muslim Tabliq sect on Day 61, who stated that “whenever man sins, such punishments like the deadly Ebola and AIDS attack mankind”.

Attempts at protection from the virus were also made in remote Kotido district in the east of the country, when, on Day 58, Karimojong warriors instigated an anti-Ebola ritual. According to the head master of a local school, this was “meant to cast out and cleanse the area of all bad omens, especially Ebola”. Several goats were killed and their intestines laid out on the ground in order to assess and interpret what lay in the future. The intestines of the first five goats apparently all read “negative”, which implied “imminent doom” for the Karimojong people. Consequently, 2000 participants in the ritual were then obliged to step on goat dung and smear their foreheads with it as “inoculation” against the virus.

Responses of the medical fraternity: Courage, exhaustion, and the (occasional) abandonment of posts

On Day 9, a senior WHO official described the medical facilities in Uganda as “outstanding compared to the classic Ebola situation” – by which he referred to poorly equipped health centres in such places as rural Sudan or DRC – but the people working in these facilities were quickly stretched to breaking point. The intense and sustained concentration required to care safely for Ebola patients exhausted the health workers, and mistakes were made. Fourteen of the 22 health workers infected in Gulu and Lacor Hospitals acquired their infection after isolation wards and other containment measures had been established [10].

Lacor Hospital was probably the best equipped and best manned of all the centres involved, but it was obliged to take the drastic step of temporarily suspending all admissions on Day 47, on account of severe physical and mental fatigue among staff. Ten health workers had died there by that stage, six in the previous 10 days. A reporter described the atmosphere as “grim, stressful and dispiriting”, and threats were circulating of an imminent strike. The most devastating blow to morale took place on Day 55, when the Medical Superintendent, Dr Lukwiya himself, died from Ebola, which had the effect of “paralysing operations in the hospital”.

Meanwhile at Masindi hospital, a cleaner in the isolation unit and an ambulance driver had fallen ill on Day 54, prompting an outcry among their colleagues who were reportedly “frightened and demoralised.” On Day 58, Masindi hospital Medical Superintendent complained that some doctors and nurses had suddenly started demanding for sick or annual leave, while others were simply not turning up for work. Nurses were complaining of exhaustion, medics were few and overworked, and the burial team had abandoned duty after facing serious stigmatisation from the community.

Finally, there was some good news on Day 63, when it was announced that 30 clinical officers and nurses from other parts of the country had volunteered to work with Ebola patients in Masindi and Gulu to relieve the medical teams there. These volunteers were not, however, entirely representative of their colleagues nationwide. A series of interviews had been published on Day 59 quoting nurses from an unaffected part of eastern Uganda, a number of whom said they would refuse to treat any Ebola patient. As one stated, “If Ebola breaks out here, I will not risk my life attending to patients, not after all those other nurses and a hospital superintendent died. I will stay away from the hospital. Let me lose my job rather than losing my life.”

The very particular risks faced by health workers provoked a powerful wave of demands for compensation and risk allowances. On Day 55 – the day of Dr Lukwiya’s death – the Ministry of Health announced that it was initiating the compensation process for the families of all health workers who had died from Ebola. This was not enough for some MPs, however, who called for special payments to uninfected health workers. As one said, “Praising them when they are dead is not enough.” Consequently, the Director General of Health Services announced on Day 64 that staff working with Ebola would receive between 15,000 and 25,000 Uganda shillings (US$8.60 to US$14.30) extra allowance per day, depending on their job. The President himself also directed that the families of health workers who died from Ebola should be paid compensation equivalent to five months’ salary.

The government’s response: Coordination, surveillance, and provision of information

Already the day before the Ministry of Health confirmed the outbreak to be Ebola, the Director General of Health Services issued a statement calling for special hygienic precautions when handling patients suspected to be suffering from this “strange” disease, as well as during the funerals of victims. On Day 4, the Minister of Health announced plans during a national radio and TV broadcast to recruit health scouts throughout Gulu district, to equip hospitals with medication and protective gear, and to establish national and district task forces that would meet daily. He added that people with symptoms should report at once for treatment, and that the dead should be buried immediately, but he also stressed that there was no need for panic. “I assure the people in Uganda and our international partners that there should be no cause for alarm, as the steps that government has taken are adequate to contain this outbreak of Ebola”.

The Ministry of Health co-ordinated the entire national control operation. This included establishing a highly sensitive surveillance system, whereby 150 volunteers in Gulu alone followed up 5,600 contacts for 21 days each (the maximum incubation period of the virus). Other activities involved updating hospital control measures, establishing safe-burial teams, and community education. The Ministry also requested WHO to co-ordinate the international response [10]. Once the epidemic was brought under control, providing support for the 600 Ebola orphans and 201 survivors became a priority. The Ministry distributed 70,000 Uganda Shillings (US$40) to each survivor in order to replace personal effects destroyed by neighbours while they were ill. It also co-ordinated the efforts of various Non Governmental Organisations to assist orphans, as well as distributing supplies donated by private organisations.

Providing assurances and accurate information to an increasingly concerned public was one of the most important components of the official response. As an opinion column in the Monitor pointed out, “Mass hysteria is best managed with calmness and scientific facts”. Frequent announcements from the Ministry of Health in all Uganda’s languages were therefore made over the radio, concerned with prevention and care, the development of the epidemic, and control measures in all the affected areas. However, there were cases of senior officials expressing perhaps unjustified optimism, which demonstrated the difficulty of finding a balance between being entirely honest and trying to keep people from becoming unduly anxious. For example, one individual stated on Day 8 that “We will get on top of this disease, and in a week or two, new cases will be history.” When this clearly did not happen, some people began to suspect that the government was not telling the truth about the numbers of infected people, and perhaps more crucially, whether or not the virus had spread to Kampala. On Day 58, a member of the National Task Force felt obliged to address this issue, stating, “I am on the ground in the whole of Kampala and I am not aware of any Ebola case. If we hide Ebola, we will kill ourselves. We are very open.”

Unfortunately, this openness did not in all cases translate to officials wanting to take active responsibility. A row erupted on Day 68 between Kampala City Council (KCC) and the Police over who should remove the corpse of an old man suspected to have died from Ebola. The man had reportedly been bleeding from the nose, eyes and mouth before he died at the entrance to one of Kampala’s taxi parks, and neither group wanted to take responsibility for the case. The Regional Police Commander said “KCC has a dumper and is equipped to handle Ebola cases”, while the KCC task force in turn said that since there was no Ebola in Kampala, it was the police’s responsibility to take the body away. The corpse lay in the road for 36 hours before a team hired by KCC finally picked it up.

In accordance with WHO guidelines [22], no special restrictions on travel or trade were imposed at any stage of the epidemic outside the very specific areas where cases had been reported. However, some local officials requested people within their jurisdiction not to travel to affected areas. For example, the Health Secretary of Kalangala District, a sparsely inhabited collection of 83 islands in Lake Victoria, asked fishermen from Gulu who were living on the islands not to travel home. “We have no quarrel with people from Gulu,” he said on Day 32. “We are merely appealing to everyone doing fish business with that district to curtail their visits until the situation clears.”

Local officials also played a key role in facilitating the resettlement of stigmatised survivors. As Gulu District Director of Health Services explained after the epidemic was over, “The survivors are not infectious, but the communities took long to accept that. So we had to set up a counselling unit to accompany them into their communities.” As part of the education process, he personally went around shaking hands with survivors in order to demonstrate that they were no longer infectious.

Regional and international responses: Scientific and financial support, and some travel restrictions

From the start, both the government and WHO were against imposing restrictions on people travelling to or from Uganda. The WHO disease outbreak co-ordinator was quoted on Day 5 as saying: “travel restrictions would be inappropriate because the disease is in a very remote part of Uganda. It spreads by direct contact with bodily fluids, not by sitting next to an infected person on a plane. Cordoning off an area does not work in situations like this.” The message was repeated numerous times throughout the epidemic, but it was not always taken up by other governments, either regionally or further afield.

Neighbouring Kenya responded by sending a “squad of public health officers” on Day 5 to the Busia border post to screen travellers coming in from Uganda. The Busia District Medical Officer said that while they were unable to test for Ebola, their task was to confine those suspected to be suffering from the disease. The policy was not consistently implemented, however, and cases were reported of healthy Ugandans being refused entry to Kenya, and even deported. For example, none of the Ugandans on board a cargo boat that docked on Day 8 at Kisumu port on Lake Victoria were allowed to disembark. Furthermore, on Day 44, the Kenyan government implemented the Epidemic Control Act in order to expel 137 delegates from a meeting in Nairobi of Acholi leaders – half of whom had travelled directly from Gulu – who had come together to discuss building peace in northern Uganda. A Ugandan Ministry of Health official lamented that, “the outbreak should not affect travel out of Uganda, but we cannot tell Kenya what to do.”

Saudi Arabia took a firm position on the epidemic, but not until it was effectively over. Around 300 Ugandan pilgrims had travelled freely to the country while the epidemic was at its height to perform the Umrah pilgrimage during Ramadan (in December 2000); but on Day 98 – just five days before the last of the survivors was discharged from hospital – a directive was sent from Riyadh to the Saudi embassy in Kampala, ordering officials to issue no more visas to Ugandans until further notice. In spite of a plea from a senior WHO official in Uganda, the ban stayed in effect throughout the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, the Hajj, in March 2001. As a result, while 600 Ugandan pilgrims had undertaken the pilgrimage in 2000, none managed to do so in 2001.

No travel restrictions were imposed by any European or North American countries. However, a “polite request” was observed by a Ugandan traveller in Oslo airport, asking anyone from Gulu to identify themselves to immigration officials. Belgium also obliged airline passengers from Entebbe to indicate on a form where they had stayed in Uganda, their place of residence in Belgium, their telephone number, and their seat number on the incoming plane.

The reaction of the international scientific and medical community was rapid, with filovirologists from CDC and WHO, and clinicians from Medicins Sans Frontieres in the country by Day 6. A team from the South African National Institute for Virology arrived on Day 41 to catch and test bats, rats, and other rodents for Ebola in an attempt to establish the natural host of the virus.

Likewise, the donor community responded quickly, supplementing by Day 6 the government’s own Ebola budget of 500 million Uganda shillings (US$285,000) with an additional US$400,000. More than 20 international NGOs and government agencies contributed to combating the epidemic [23], providing expertise, cash, protective gear, medicines, vehicles, disinfectant, walkie-talkies, relief food and provisions for survivors. It is difficult accurately to calculate the value of the donated goods from press cuttings, but collectively the reports suggest that it was well in excess of US$3.5 million.

The WHO representative in Uganda commended the efforts of the donor community, saying, “It was as if people thought: ‘there is a disaster somewhere. Let us go and help our brothers’. I have never seen it anywhere else.” However, the donations were not always given purely out of selflessness. As the Irish Junior Foreign Affairs Minister admitted, “this is the sole viable response since there is no specific treatment or vaccine for Ebola. The consequences of an uncontained outbreak would be horrendous.”

Controversy over the source: Scoring political points

The most politically heated issue of the outbreak concerned where it had come from. Many of the early victims had lived in Aswa County, near Gulu town, where a number of UPDF soldiers, returning from the ongoing war in the DRC, had briefly been settled. As a result, some Gulu residents thought that the soldiers and their newly acquired Congolese wives had brought the disease with them, accusations which were swiftly denied by the army (see also [12]).

However, in an editorial on Day 5, the Monitor suggested that the government ought to use “people and institutions who are credible” – in other words, not members of the UPDF, which itself was being charged with bringing the virus – for the dissemination of information. Otherwise, “they will be suspected of covering up”. The Monitor argued that a partisan response would not carry the same weight in the public’s mind as one issued by, for example, the Ministry of Health. Subsequently, the Minister of Health himself announced that returning UPDF soldiers were not responsible for the outbreak, adding “if any soldier died of Ebola, we would tell you.”

The official position seemed to be vindicated on Day 9, when virologists from the Centres for Disease Control (CDC) announced that they had identified the culpable strain as the Ebola-Sudan variety – as opposed to the other major strain, Ebola-Zaire – which had last been recorded in Nzara, southern Sudan, in 1979. However, according to an opinion column in the Monitor, the announcement was immediately seized upon by “some chaps in government [who] saw this as a gold mine to deliver a political statement”: that LRA rebels based in Sudan – and not the UPDF in the DRC – must therefore have brought the virus. The idea was supported by “unconfirmed” but highly suggestive reports in the New Vision that the rebels had been trading in the brains of baboons and monkeys. On that very same day, however, the rebels themselves released 40 people they had recently abducted in Gulu, apparently because they were afraid of catching Ebola. Furthermore, on Day 19, it was reported that they had abandoned one of their transit routes through one of the main Ebola-hit areas.

The actual source of the outbreak will, in all likelihood, never be known. As one of the WHO Ebola specialists explained, central Africa is “endemic for filoviruses… [and] it’s not inconceivable that there has been an Ebola virus in Uganda for some time”. Nonetheless, when the epidemic was finally declared over and the lessons learned were being discussed and analysed, a Monitor editorial took the opportunity to argue that “the best thing is to avoid a situation where diseases are brought by soldiers returning from foreign military adventures, rebels or fleeing refugees. We should have sound politics at home so that we live in peace with our neighbours”.