DODOMA: Tanzania has sent a team of health experts to probe a mysterious disease that has killed five people, the government said.
The illness was detected in “seven people (with) symptoms including fever, bleeding in various body parts, vomiting, and kidney failure,” the health ministry said in a statement released late on Thursday.
The government has dispatched a rapid response team to Kagera’s northwestern region, which borders Uganda, to probe the “communicable disease,” said Tanzania’s chief medical officer Tumaini Nagu in the statement.
“Samples have been taken from the ailing persons and the dead to identify the source and type of illness,” the chief medical officer said, urging the public to keep calm but take precautionary measures to avoid contagion.
Tanzania’s govt identifies leptospirosis outbreak
The investigation follows an Ebola outbreak in Uganda that lasted nearly four months and killed at least 55 people before the government declared an end in January.
Last year, the Tanzanian government identified an outbreak of leptospirosis, also called “rat fever,” which killed three people in the southeastern Lindi region.
The bacterial infection is normally spread through consuming food and water contaminated by infected animal urine.
Tanzanian President Samia Suluhu Hassan said at the time that the disease might have been caused by “growing interaction” between wild animals and humans due to environmental degradation.
