Uganda
oracknows | May 22, 2017As much as I like to deconstruct pseudoscientific claims, particularly about health, medicine, and health care, Sometimes it gets a bit draining. There's just so much pseudoscience, so much credulity, so much sheer idiocy out there that trying to refute them and encourage a more skeptical mindset often feels like pissing into the ocean, for all the effect it has. In the age of fake news and Donald Trump, it even feels as though we're going backward—and not slowly, either. That's why I felt it was time for a bit of a break, a bit more optimism than I've been able to muster before. So it was a…
tsmith | October 19, 2012Uganda's latest Ebola outbreak, which I covered back in July, was just officially declared over on October 5th, a mere two weeks ago. Now today there is a report that three are dead from an outbreak of Marburg virus. That makes 4 Ebola outbreaks and now 2 Marburg outbreaks in the country since 2000.
tsmith | August 18, 2012August, 1976. A new infection was causing panic in Zaire. Hospitals became death zones, as both patients and medical staff succumbed to the disease. Reports of nightmarish symptoms trickled in to scientists in Europe and the US, who sent investigators to determine the cause and stem the epidemic. Concurrently, they would find out, the same thing was happening hundreds of miles to the north in Sudan. In all, 284 would be infected in that country, and another 358 in Zaire--over 600 cases (and almost 500 deaths) due to a mysterious new disease in just a few months' time.
The new agent was Ebola…
tsmith | July 30, 2012Uganda just can't catch a break. They've recently been hit with nodding disease, a mysterious syndrome where children repeatedly nod their heads and undergo serious seizures, typically leading to death. Now they're in the grips of another Ebola outbreak. This will be the fourth time the country has suffered through Ebola since 2000, when the virus was first found in the country:
The first occurred in August of 2000; the first case died in Gulu on the 17th of September. Despite an investigation, doctors were unable to determine where or how she had contracted the disease. Her death was…
tsmith | March 27, 2012The emergence of "new" diseases is a complicated issue. "New" diseases often just means "new to biomedical science." Viruses like Ebola and HIV were certainly circulating in Africa in animal reservoirs for decades, and probably millenia, before they came to the attention of physicians via human infections. Hantavirus in the American southwest has likely infected many people, causing pneumonia of unknown origin, before the Four Corners outbreak led to the eventual identification of the Sin Nombre virus. Encroachment of humans into new areas can bring them into contact with novel infectious…
tsmith | May 16, 2011Via H5N1 and other sources, there's at least one new Ebola case in Uganda:
The rare and deadly Ebola virus has killed a 12-year-old Ugandan girl and health officials said on Saturday they expected more cases.
The girl from Luwero district, 75 km (45 miles) north of the capital Kampala, died on May 6, said Anthony Mbonye, the government's commissioner for community health, in the first outbreak of the virus in Uganda in four years.
"Laboratory investigations have confirmed Ebola to be the primary cause of the illness and death. So there is one case reported but we expect other…
gregladen | October 15, 2009I have been to Uganda a number times, but only illegally or by accident, in which case I was in the remote bush, or in transit, stopping at Entebbe Airport, so I can't say that I know much, directly, about the culture there. However, I have spent months in Kenya and years in Zaire/Congo, and a little time in Tanzania and Rwanda, so I've kinda got Uganda surrounded. I can tell you that the political culture and government of Zaire/Congo, Kenya, Tanzania and Rwanda are very, very different from one another. At the same time, all of these countries have certain commonalities that are relevant…