2022 Uganda Ebola Outbreak: Situational Awareness

Name: 2022 Uganda Ebola Outbreak: Situational Awareness
Start: 2022-12-07T16:00:00-0500
End: 2022-12-07T17:00:00-0500

RSVP Required Open to the Public

The 2022 Ebola outbreak caused by the Sudan virus in Uganda has been challenging and further complicating the country’s recovery efforts from COVID-19. This seminar will cover how Uganda has handled the outbreak that began in September 2022, its effect on the country’s social and economic recovery, and how global public health institutions are assisting in combating this new outbreak.

Join Belfer Fellow Dr. Syra Madad in conversation with Dr. Amy Boore, Dr. Henry Kyobe, Dr. Joel Montomery, and Corti Paul Lakuma.

While this virtual event is on the record, the event organizers prohibit any attendees, including journalists, from audio/visual recording or distributing parts or all of the event program without prior written authorization.

Date: Wed, Dec 7, 2022 Time: 04:00pm - 05:00pm

First Aid worker screening for body temperature

Speakers

Dr. Amy Boore currently serves as the Program Director for the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Division of Global Health Protection in Uganda. She joined CDC in 2007 as an Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) Officer where she led or participated in over a dozen outbreaks in the US and internationally.

Dr. Boore served as the Associate Director for Science and Systems with CDC Mozambique from 2009-2015. She then spent two years at CDC headquarters as a team lead for the Field Epidemiology Training Program (FETP), after which she relocated to CDC Uganda at the start of 2018. Her program initiatives in Uganda have included the introduction of Zoom/ECHO online communities of practice to the PEPFAR program, establishment of the first Regional Emergency Operations Centers in country, and significant expansion of the scope, impact and sustainability of infection prevention and control (IPC), border health, FETP/workforce development, emergency management, and surveillance data systems at the MOH. In 2020, Dr. Boore supported the MOH to establish an incident management structure for COVID-19 response and also established a supportive US Government (USG) interagency incident command within US Mission Kampala which she led as Incident Manager from February 2020. Most recently she led a small team to assist the MOH with the initial response to the Ebola outbreak in Mubende, and she has served as the USG interagency incident manager for Ebola response in country since the start of the outbreak.

Dr. Boore holds a PhD in epidemiology (2007) and a Masters in Public Health (MPH), both from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Dr. Henry Kyobe Bosa, is a commissioned military officer, a Lt Col, medical doctor, researcher, and an emerging infectious diseases epidemiologist. Dr. Kyobe is the National Ebola Virus Disease Incident Commander in the Ministry of Health of Uganda, but before this, he held same position as the COVID-19 Incident Commander till now. In this role, Henry oversees the overall technical and operational nodes of the Ebola and COVID-1 response in the Ministry of Health in Uganda. Dr. Kyobe was re-assigned by His Excellence the President of Uganda to the Ministry of Health from Uganda Peoples Defense Forces, where he was an active-duty officer.

Dr. Kyobe is Uganda’s representative to African Ebola Coordination Taskforce, AfECT, a joint African Union/WHO AFRO coordinating mechanism born out of the Regional Ministerial Meeting on Ebola outbreak in Uganda (2022) and a follow on of the Goma Ebola Declaration of 2018. Dr. Kyobe is a scientist and an author. His latest OpEd in The New York Times titled “Uganda’s Ebola Outbreak Is a Test of What We’ve Learned from Covid” was published in November 2022, highlighting the apparent rapture of community confidence in public health interventions as a result of the strigent COVID-19 interventions.

Dr. Kyobe is a graduate of Makerere University in Uganda, Institute of Tropical Medicine Antwerp in Belgium, University of Ancona in Italy, and University of Washington in the United States. Dr. Kyobe is a husband, a father, a Christian, and a rotatian.

Corti Paul Lakuma is a Research Fellow in the macroeconomics department at the Economic Policy Research Centre. Mr. Lakuma is an established forecaster, economic model builder and adviser with more than a decade of service to government and international organizations. He has advised the Finance Ministry in Uganda on macroeconomic and fiscal policy, fiscal institutions and revenue administration. He has worked on the Domestic Resource Mobilization Strategy for the medium term for Uganda, where he authored numerous diagnostic papers to inform the reform process.

Most recently, Mr. Lakuma has been involved in the conduct of several firm level surveys to establish the socio-economic impact of COVID-19 on the productivity of Uganda’s employees, firms and industry. He holds an MSc in Economics with distinction at the University of Essex, United Kingdom and BA Social Science from Makerere University Kampala (MUK) Uganda. In his spare time, Mr. Lakuma plays basketball.

Dr. Joel M. Montgomery, PhD, CAPT US Public Health Service is the Chief of the Viral Special Pathogens Branch (VSPB) in NCEZID’s Division of High Consequence Pathogens and Pathology. He oversees a diverse portfolio of public health research, response, and partner country capacity enhancement to high consequence pathogens such as Ebola, Nipah virus, Lassa fever, hantavirus, Rift Valley fever and Crimean Congo Hemorrhagic Fever. He has served as the CDC’s Incident Manager for responses to Ebola outbreaks in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Guinea, and Uganda since June 2020. Prior to his current role he was chief of the Epidemiology, Informatics, and Surveillance Lab Branch (formally Global Disease Detection Branch) in CDC’s Division of Global Health Protection, Center for Global Health.

Dr. Montgomery served as director of the division’s programs in CDC-Kenya and principal deputy director for Kenya’s country office from 2011-2015. Prior to his appointment in Kenya, Dr. Montgomery served for 5 years (2006-2011) as director of the Department of Emerging Infections at the US Naval Medical Research Unit Six (NAMRU-6) in Lima, Peru. In this position, he directed an innovative study in the Amazon examining changes in human land use patterns on disease transmission. Dr. Montgomery is an alumnus of CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) program. He received his training from the Viral Special Pathogens Branch, where he worked on several high-profile international outbreaks including SARS in Vietnam, Monkeypox and Nipah virus in Bangladesh, and Marburg hemorrhagic fever in Angola.