The director-general of Africa’s leading public health agency has appealed directly to the United States, urging Washington to remove Ebola-related travel restrictions imposed on Uganda after the country went nearly a month without a single new infection.
Jean Kaseya, who heads the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, said he had personally written to U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., pressing him to reconsider the measures. Speaking at a conference in Accra, Ghana, on Tuesday, Kaseya argued that the data no longer justified keeping Uganda under the same restrictions applied to countries still battling active Ebola transmission.
“There is no reason for the U.S. to continue with this travel restriction,” Kaseya told delegates, framing the request as a matter of fairness given Uganda’s progress in containing its outbreak. He also called on other African nations to publicly back his letter to Kennedy, describing such support as a signal of continental solidarity with countries still recovering from Ebola’s effects.
Uganda’s outbreak has been comparatively contained. The country discharged its last confirmed Ebola patient on July 16, a milestone that started a 42-day observation period mandated by World Health Organization guidelines before a nation can be formally declared free of the virus. If no further cases emerge during that window, Uganda would be cleared of active Ebola transmission entirely. In total, Uganda has recorded 20 Ebola cases since the outbreak began, a relatively small number when set against the more than 2,400 cases reported in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which remains the epicenter of the regional Ebola crisis.
Kaseya was careful to distinguish between Uganda’s trajectory and the continuing emergency in Congo, where Ebola transmission has not been brought under control. “It’s time today to lift the status,” he said, referring to the travel measures on Uganda, “and then we’ll continue to support DRC on the challenge they are facing.” His comments suggest the Africa CDC is not asking Washington to ease restrictions across the board, but rather to recalibrate its response so it matches the actual state of Ebola transmission in each country.
The restrictions at issue were first introduced by the United States in May, covering travelers who had recently passed through Congo, as well as some travelers arriving from Uganda and South Sudan due to their proximity to the outbreak. Washington tightened those rules further just last week, a move that drew criticism from African health officials who felt the tightening ran counter to the encouraging trend of falling Ebola case numbers in Uganda.
Public health specialists have long argued that travel bans tied to disease outbreaks can carry steep economic and diplomatic costs while offering only limited benefits once an outbreak is clearly waning. Kaseya’s appeal appears to lean on that argument, framing Uganda’s month-long stretch without new Ebola cases as clear evidence that blanket restrictions are no longer proportionate to the risk.
For now, the fate of Kaseya’s request rests with U.S. health authorities. Whether Kennedy’s department will act on the letter, and how quickly, remains unclear. In the meantime, Uganda continues its 42-day countdown, a period during which health workers will keep monitoring contacts and communities for any sign that the Ebola virus is still circulating.
If the country reaches the end of that window without incident, Uganda would join the ranks of nations that have successfully stamped out an Ebola outbreak, even as neighboring Congo continues to grapple with the disease on a far larger scale.
