Ebola cases in Kenya rise to eight as one more confirmed

Health Director General Patrick Amoth on Sunday told Citizen TV that the Ministry of Health tested 38 people on Sunday and one turned out to be positive for the Bundibugyo strain.

The new case is of a patient attendant.

“Not a direct health care worker, a 49-year-old gentleman who developed symptoms of fever, headache, and muscle pain, and his test came out positive,” Amoth said on the new Ebola case.

Amoth said the patient has since been isolated and is being prepared to receive compassionate treatment that has been administered to the 7 other patients.

The confirmed patients have been receiving Monoclonal Antibodies treatment, which the DG says “they have been responding very well.”

The new case comes after the country announced four new Ebola cases on Saturday, including a close male relative of the country’s first patient and three health workers who attended to him while he was in hospital.

Amoth further allayed fears of community transmission, saying there was a low possibility that the quarantined persons transmitted the disease at community level.

“They develop the symptoms much, much later, day nine, day ten. So by the time they were in the community, they were not symptomatic, and therefore the potential to spread to another person is very, very minimal, literally non-existent,” he said.

The health Director has further warned the public against misinformation, amid doubts on Kenya’s Ebola status.

“Ebola is a serious, a fatal illness and highly transmissible, and therefore we need to be able to put everything in place to ensure that we quickly control the outbreak. This is a real problem,” he said.

Amth further warned that such misinformation worsened the spread of the disease in DR Congo.

“This is the situation that happened in DR Congo, where people said there is no Ebola. They went and picked the bodies from the treatment unit. Then we had those super spreader events, and you see how the outbreak has blown over, outside control. While Uganda took the same measures that we have taken now, had a case fatality of only two people out of 13 dying. So that is the direction we want to take as a country,” he said.

With eight cases so far, Amoth says Kenya has received support from partners including the World Health Organization, the United States government and AMREF.

“We moved quickly because as a regional hub, we knew we were at risk to be able to develop our contingency plan, which is costed at about, I think it's about 20 million U.S. dollars over a three- to six-month period. So far the United States government is the one that has come in fully. They gave us 14.5 U.S. dollars through the implementing partners,” said the Health DG.

Kenya confirmed its first Ebola case on October 6. The first patient was a man who had been living in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

He arrived in Nairobi on October 3, 2026, and died on the night of October 5 while receiving treatment at Nairobi Hospital.