South Sudan establishes national Ebola committee following outbreak in Uganda

The President of South Sudan, Salva Kiir, has announced the creation of a national committee to deal with the threat of Ebola following the outbreak of the disease in Uganda and the testing of several suspected cases that have arrived in the country.

Kiir has indicated in a decree that this committee will be integrated by the ministers of Interior, Health, Finance, Cabinet Affairs, Transport, Nature, Tourism and Education, among others, according to the South Sudanese radio station Eye Radio.

The body will also include senior members of the security forces and the director general of the Civil Aviation Authority, while the ministers of Cabinet Affairs and Health, Elia Lumuru and Yolanda Awel Deng, respectively, will head the team.

He said the committee will be tasked to ensure that the country is fully prepared to respond to the Ebola threat and to carry out an assessment of the situation and set up equipped isolation centers in case cases are reported in South Sudan.

The director general of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said on Wednesday that 63 Ebola cases and 29 deaths have already been confirmed in Uganda and called for clinical trials of new vaccines to be conducted in the country.

Uganda declared the Ebola outbreak on Sept. 20 after confirming the death of a patient who tested positive, after which WHO said the confirmation followed an investigation by the national rapid response team after six "suspicious deaths" in the district over the past month.

The agency noted that the outbreak is of the Zaire strain. To date, seven outbreaks of this strain -- four in Uganda and three in Sudan -- have been detected. Uganda reported its last case of this strain in 2012, while in 2019 it declared an outbreak for the Zaire strain, imported from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).