Uganda's efforts to contain an Ebola outbreak were starting to succeed and the country has tightened restrictions in the outbreak's epicenter to further slow the rate of infections, President Yoweri Museveni said on Tuesday.
Two districts where the deadly hemorrhagic fever had spread previously were now free of the disease after they completed the 42 days - or two incubation cycles - of the virus without a case, he said in a televised speech.
"Bunyangabo and Kagadi districts have been dropped from the follow-up list. "So I want to congratulate Kagadi and Bunyangabo."
Overall cases were falling, but some infected people were still slipping through a quarantine imposed on Mubende and Kasanda districts - the epicenter of the outbreak in central Uganda - and traveling to other regions and exporting cases there, Museveni said.
On Sunday, health minister Jane Ruth Aceng said an Ebola case had been confirmed in Jinja in the country's east, the first time the outbreak had spread to a new region of the country from central Uganda where cases have been confined so far.
Museveni said while residents of Mubende had largely observed quarantine, those in Kasanda had flouted some rules, including a family that exhumed a relative who had died of Ebola for reburial, leading to more deaths. "So here in Kasanda, in one family, 11 people are dead," he said.