It’s an announcement many had been eagerly awaiting. This Tuesday, July 28, the Ugandan government officially declared the end of its Ebola virus disease outbreak, Bundibugyo strain, which had been shaking the country for several months. A health victory achieved after a 42-day surveillance period with no new cases reported since the last recovered patient was discharged on June 16.
The announcement was made by Uganda’s Minister of Health, Chris Baryomusi, who took the opportunity to praise the work carried out by all the teams mobilized during this crisis. « The Ministry of Health is pleased to announce that Uganda has officially declared the end of the 2026 Ebola virus disease outbreak. Today, Uganda is Ebola-free, » he stated, cited by the Xinhua news agency. According to the minister, progress made in the epidemiological investigations, along with the fully characterized nature of the outbreak, provided sufficient evidence that the chain of transmission had been completely interrupted.
This declaration comes after several months of intense mobilization by Ugandan health authorities, who were confronted with a particularly dreaded strain of the Ebola virus. Unlike the Zaire strain, the most common one in previous outbreaks in the Great Lakes region, the Bundibugyo strain has no vaccine or specific treatment approved to date. This lack of targeted therapeutic tools made the response especially challenging, forcing the country to rely primarily on classic measures of epidemiological surveillance, isolation of patients and contact tracing.
In total, the outbreak caused 20 confirmed cases in Uganda, including 18 recoveries and two deaths, with most infections linked to cases imported from the Democratic Republic of Congo. But this announcement does not mean an immediate easing of vigilance. Following any official declaration of the end of an outbreak, the WHO recommends an additional 90-day period of enhanced surveillance, designed to detect any residual cases linked to the possible persistence of the virus in certain bodily fluids of survivors. This precaution has already helped, during previous flare-ups, to contain isolated resurgences before they could reach community-wide proportions.
Uganda’s outbreak unfolds against a deeply worrying regional backdrop. A far larger flare-up of the same Bundibugyo strain continues to rage across the border, in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. According to the latest available figures, as of July 25, this Congolese outbreak has already caused more than 3,200 cases and 1,405 deaths across the provinces of Ituri, North Kivu and South Kivu. These regions, which border Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi, see significant population movements and remain difficult to access due to persistent insecurity, considerably complicating Congo’s health response.
Given the scale of this regional flare-up, the World Health Organization’s Director-General had already declared, back on May 17, that the Congolese outbreak constituted a « public health emergency of international concern. » A month later, on June 5, the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, working alongside the WHO, launched a joint continental response plan lasting six months, aimed at strengthening the region’s capacity to contain the spread of the virus. As part of this effort, the pan-African institution had specifically called for the urgent opening of humanitarian corridors and « peace corridors, » to allow government authorities and humanitarian organizations safe access to the highest-risk areas.
It is precisely this geographic proximity to the active outbreak zones in the DRC that pushed several neighboring countries to raise their alert level in recent weeks. Burundi, in particular, had placed its territory on maximum alert as early as May, despite never having recorded a single confirmed case on its soil. Burundi’s Health Minister had at the time stressed the proximity of the outbreak’s epicenters, located less than 400 kilometers from the Burundian border, and the heightened risk of the virus being imported due to regular population movements between the three countries.
For Uganda, the official end of the outbreak marks above all the closing of a national chapter, without signaling the end of the danger at a regional level. The country will most likely need to maintain heightened vigilance at its borders as long as the situation in the DRC remains unstable, where the outbreak continues to progress at a faster pace than during previous resurgences observed in that country. This Ugandan announcement could nonetheless serve as a model and offer renewed hope to Congolese authorities, demonstrating that a rigorous, well-coordinated response sustained over time can, ultimately, defeat one of the continent’s most feared diseases.