WHO Declares Uganda's Ebola Outbreak Over After 42-Day Countdown

Uganda's latest Ebola outbreak is officially over, the World Health Organization and Africa's continental public health agency announced jointly Thursday, closing out a three-month response that traced back to cross-border spread from an outbreak still raging in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

According to a statement from the WHO's Regional Office for Africa, the outbreak was declared on May 15 after cases of Bundibugyo virus disease, one of six known species of ebolavirus, were confirmed in the country. In total, Uganda recorded 20 confirmed cases: 15 imported from Congo and five acquired locally among contacts and health workers. Eighteen patients recovered and two died. More than 800 contacts were identified and monitored throughout the response. The last patient was discharged on July 16, and the declaration follows 42 consecutive days without a new confirmed case — twice the virus's maximum incubation period, the internationally recognized threshold health authorities use to confirm that a chain of transmission has truly ended rather than merely gone quiet. Uganda's Ministry of Health tracked the response daily on its own outbreak dashboard, which recorded the case count holding at 20 for more than a month before Thursday's closure.

A joint declaration, and a joint warning

The announcement was issued as a coordinated statement between WHO and the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, the African Union's public health agency, underscoring how the response was run as a continental effort rather than a purely national one. "Uganda has demonstrated that with decisive action, Ebola outbreaks can be brought under control quickly," WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in the statement. Africa CDC Director-General Jean Kaseya struck a similar note, saying Uganda "has shown that Ebola can be stopped when leadership acts decisively, communities are trusted and public health systems reach people quickly." WHO's regional director for Africa, Mohamed Janabi, added that "ending an Ebola outbreak is an important milestone, but the lasting achievement is a stronger ability to protect people from future health threats."

That note of caution reflects the outbreak's origin. All 15 of Uganda's imported cases trace back to the far larger Bundibugyo virus outbreak in eastern Congo, which the two agencies have separately described as the fastest-growing Ebola outbreak on record, with case counts running into the thousands and a substantially higher death toll than Uganda's contained cluster. Uganda's success closing its own chain of transmission does not, on its own, resolve the source outbreak next door, and both agencies used Thursday's statement to pledge continued cross-border coordination rather than treat Uganda's case as fully separate from the regional emergency. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has kept an active Level 2 travel health notice covering both countries, last updated Aug. 4, advising travelers to practice enhanced precautions in Uganda and to avoid nonessential travel to the hardest-hit Congolese provinces of Ituri and Nord-Kivu.

Why the distinction matters

Uganda has now closed several Ebola outbreaks in rapid succession in recent years, building an increasingly practiced emergency-response system that combines contact tracing, ring vaccination where doses are available, and rapid isolation of suspected cases — the same toolkit credited with the 42-day, zero-case run that let this outbreak be formally closed. Public health officials frequently point to Uganda's track record as a model for how a country can contain imported cases even while the source outbreak abroad remains active and uncontrolled, a distinction that matters for governments and airlines deciding how broadly to apply travel restrictions. For Uganda, Thursday's declaration ends a specific, three-month public health emergency, a milestone covered internationally even as it drew a smaller share of attention than the crisis next door. For the region, the underlying threat that produced it, the still-growing outbreak across the border in Congo, remains exactly where it was: unresolved.