GENEVA The death toll in Uganda's Ebola fever outbreak has climbed to 47 out of a total of 122 cases reported so far, the World Health Organization said on Friday.
Spokesman Valery Abramov of the Geneva-based UN agency told a news briefing there had been six fresh deaths overnight.
The outbreak has struck Gulu District in northern Uganda, where a team of U.S. medical experts arrived on Thursday to help fight the virus.
Members of the six-man team from the Atlanta-based centers for Disease Control and Prevention said their first goal would be to confirm the diagnosis of the disease and identify its first victim.
Before the outbreak in Uganda, WHO says Ebola fever had claimed 793 lives in nearly 1,100 documented cases since the virus was first discovered in 1976 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where an epidemic killed more than 270 people.
The exact origin of the virus and how and why it flares up are unknown.
Symptoms include sudden onset of fever, weakness, headache, muscle ache, abdominal pain and sore throat, followed by vomiting, diarrhea and internal and external bleeding.
The latest outbreak is the first time Ebola has struck in Uganda, although an outbreak of Marburg fever, which has similar characteristics, killed 19 people there in 1976.
WHO says it expects the number of cases to rise.
But officials were unable to say whether the outbreak was set to match one that killed 245 people in the Congolese town of Kikwit in 1995.
(Reuter)