KAMPALA A recent outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus in Uganda has hit the country's tourism industry just as it was showing signs of recovery, a Uganda Tourism Board (UTB) chief said.

Ebola, first identified in the northern district of Gulu in early October, has killed 162 people and spread to two other districts before being contained.

"This really hurt us. As far as tourists are concerned Ebola is in Uganda not just in northern Uganda," Ignatius Nakishero, UTB marketing manager, told Reuters.

Only two deaths have been recorded in the past two weeks but health officials concede it is still too early to say the outbreak is over.

Death from Ebola -- brought on by massive internal bleeding -- comes within 21 days of contact with the virus, but Uganda can only be declared Ebola-free after there are no Ebola-related deaths for 42 days.

"Our hope right now is that the World Health Organization will declare Uganda Ebola-free in January. Then we might be able to salvage the rest of the season," Nakishero told Reuters.

The country's reputation as a tourist destination was damaged in early 1999 when ethnic Hutu rebels from neighboring Rwanda murdered eight foreign tourists and a Ugandan warden in the Bwindi impenetrable forest national park in southwest Uganda.

The area is one of the few remaining reserves of the rare mountain gorilla.

The murder cost Uganda's tourism industry an estimated $8 million in lost revenue in 1999.

Earlier this year, hundreds of followers of an obscure cult, the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God, died in what first looked like a mass suicide but later appeared to be mass murder organized by the cult's leaders.

"We had had so much bad news up to that point that any bad news is magnified that much more," Nakishero said.

He said the UTB tried to limit the damage by making regular appearances at European tourism exhibitions and offering press tours to Uganda -- with some degree of success.

"Things were coming along the right lines," he said. "The tour wholesalers had regained confidence and we were beginning to get good press again but this Ebola has set us back."

Visits to Uganda's national parks have fallen sharply to fewer than 30,000 this year from a high of 95,000 in 1996.

Uganda once rivaled its neighbors Kenya and Tanzania with its large herds of elephants, rhinos and other wildlife. But its wildlife populations, and the tourism sector, were ravaged by political crisis and the collapse of law and order in the 1970s.

(Reuter)