GULU - The United States Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says it will send a team to Uganda today to see if an outbreak of haemorrhagic fever there is Ebola virus.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) says 43 people have died in the outbreak since it started two weeks ago.
Officials in northern Uganda have put three districts under quarantine and say they will use force to prevent anyone leaving the area, which is crowded with refugees. Neighbouring Kenya fears an influx.
Ebola fever is a newly identified disease which, like other haemorrhagic fevers, causes bleeding throughout the body. But the bleeding does not kill - organ failure or shock does.
Depending on the strain, it kills up to 70 per cent of victims and there is no treatment or cure.
While Ugandan officials and the WHO say they suspect the outbreak is Ebola, the CDC said it had not been able to test any samples to confirm this yet.
The CDC is called on worldwide to help to diagnose and handle such outbreaks.
CDC spokeswoman Barbara Reynolds said it believed the Ugandan outbreak was viral haemorrhagic fever, not Ebola, despite the diagnosis of South Africa's Institute of Virology.
The four-person team will work under the auspices of WHO and the Ugandan Ministry of Health.
The ministry is under fire for waiting seven days after the first reported deaths before sending a fact-finding mission.
The CDC team will find a trading-post town with one airstrip - suitable only for small aircraft - a decrepit railway line and a poor road.
The greatest challenge facing health officials in their bid to seal off the area and ascertain the spread of the disease - which may already have killed an untold number of people in remote villages - is the inestimable size of the population.
Gulu district, 300km north of Kampala, has two refugee camps, which contain about one-third of the district's population.
Displaced by a 12-year insurgency and the fear of attack by the southern Sudan-based Lord's Resistance Army, Gulu's refugees live under tarpaulin cover and in mud huts, and largely do not have access to sanitation.
The town hospital, where the supposedly isolated ward has no glass windows, was rapidly overwhelmed by the number of cases.
Ebola virus, named after a river in the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire) where it was first recognised, has killed 793 of 1100 confirmed victims since it was identified in 1976.
Since then, Ebola outbreaks have been reported in Gabon, Sudan and the Ivory Coast, with one case of infection reported in Britain, where a laboratory worker was infected by a contaminated needle in 1976, and another in Liberia.
Outbreaks are usually limited after they are identified, because the virus can be spread only through contact with contaminated bodily fluids such as blood.
It does not spread through the air.
But the virus is hard to identify immediately because it starts out looking like many other viral infections, with fever, headache, stomach pain and diarrhoea.
Death can occur within a week.
All doctors can do is try to keep the patient from dying of shock or an accompanying infection, giving them fluids and trying to keep blood pressure up.
It spreads to family members and healthcare workers who tend to the ill.
The CDC said on its website that African healthcare workers risked exposure to the virus by not wearing masks, gowns or gloves.
Contamination can spread when needles or syringes are reused.
Ugandan officials said three student nurses had died in the latest outbreak.
It is still unclear how the virus reached Gulu. The last major outbreak was in 1995, when 245 people died in Kikwit, in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The virus is carried by wild animals and it is believed it could spread to humans who eat bushmeat - a common practice in refugee camps near national parks.
There is speculation that Ebola could have been carried by a Ugandan soldier returning from the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Early in August, 4000 soldiers returned to Uganda from service in the former Zaire.
Many are believed to have been stationed in Aswa county - part of Gulu district.
- REUTERS, INDEPENDENT
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Virus stalks Uganda's misery zone
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