MILWAUKEE — The Milwaukee Health Department is monitoring 3 individuals at low risk for Ebola after they were screened following travel to the Democratic Republic of Congo or Uganda, the two countries where the World Health Organization declared a public health emergency last month.
The individuals are not suspected cases, and the health department says there is currently no public health concern for Milwaukee residents.
Ebola has claimed dozens of lives in the Congo and one in Uganda.
Pastor Tonny Kizza leads a church in Whitefish Bay. He is from Uganda and has lived in the U.S. for 10 years. He has seen over a half dozen outbreaks of the rare but lethal disease.
"And it is sad. It scares people. It worries us. It has taken our people," Kizza said.
Kizza says the response to the outbreak needs to be collaborative.
Watch: Milwaukee health department monitors 3 people for low-risk Ebola after travel
"The effort to contain it, it can't be a one-country effort. Now we'll need support from all the regions because apart from colonial borders, our people cross over from one country to another," Kizza said.
Deacon Gary Nosacek and Dr. Cynthia Jones-Nosacek have spent the last decade doing health clinics in rural Uganda. Jones-Nosacek says she worries about health care workers who might be under-resourced.
The two say that while the danger is real, people in the U.S. must remember Ebola is not as highly contagious as diseases like COVID-19.
"So it's only through body fluids, you know, from the, you know, when they vomit or from the diarrhea, from those, from those kinds of things. So for the general population, it's not gonna be a problem. For those who are exposed, it could be a problem," Jones-Nosacek said.
A Milwaukee Health Department spokesperson put the current cases into perspective: during the major outbreak from fall of 2014 to summer of 2016, the city had a total of 39 low-risk contact cases — none of those individuals ended up contracting the disease.
As of now, there are no confirmed cases in the United States.
This story was reported on-air by a journalist and has been converted to this platform with the assistance of AI. Our editorial team verifies all reporting on all platforms for fairness and accuracy.
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