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A doctor diagnosed with Ebola in Uganda shares his journey with the disease
A Ugandan trainee doctor who recovered from Ebola was officially discharged from hospital on Tuesday (Oct 11), the BBC reported.
Hudson Kunsa is a final year medical student and a trainee doctor at Mubende hospital. He shared his journey to recovery with the BBC in an interview.
He said that "you start with general body weakness, fevers. Your first thought as a doctor is to rule out the common things we have. I went and took my test for Ebola. After two days when they called me to the hospital, I knew it was positive."
Kunsa went on saying: “So after we went to the isolation [centre] with the symptoms just starting and two, three, four, five days down the road we were at the peak of all the symptoms that you know of; the vomiting, the diarrhoea, the general body weakness. It was not a very good experience."
The thought of death always lurked in his mind, he said.
“At one point I was scared, thinking that we were going to die. You would see yourself diarrheaing everything out. They tell you, you have to drink but still you don’t want to drink. But eventually I came out. But the scared part was there.” the BBC quoted Kunsa as saying.
Kunsa blamed the lack of protective equipment for contracting the disease.
“This happened because we didn’t enough protective equipment as medics to use. By the time the patient we worked on died and we started experiencing the symptoms we knew that possibly we could also be infected with Ebola," he said.
Health worker in Uganda dies of Ebola, raising toll from virus to 10
Ebola is transmitted to people from wild animals and spreads in the human population through human-to-human transmission, the WHO said.
The Ebola virus causes an acute, serious illness which is often fatal if untreated. Community engagement is key to successfully controlling outbreaks, it mentioned.
The 2014–2016 outbreak in West Africa was the largest Ebola outbreak since the virus was first discovered in 1976. The outbreak started in Guinea and then moved across land borders to Sierra Leone and Liberia, the WHO noted on its website.
Uganda health ministry confirms Ebola outbreak
The 2022 Uganda Ebola outbreak is an ongoing outbreak of the Sudan ebolavirus, which causes Ebola, in the Western Region and Central Region of Uganda.
It is Uganda´s fifth outbreak with Sudan ebolavirus and a total of 63 reported cases and 29 reported deaths as of October 10, 2022.
levantnews-BBC
