Five-year-old boy dies from Ebola in Uganda: health official

A five-year-old boy who tested positive for Ebola in Uganda has died, a health ministry official told AFP Wednesday, in the first spread of a deadly outbreak in neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo.

"The boy who tested positive for Ebola in Kasese yesterday passed on last night in the isolation unit," the official told AFP on condition of anonymity.

"The minister for health (Ruth Aceng) will be briefing the country about the death of the boy and arrangements to bury the body." The official said the child was likely to be buried Wednesday.

Uganda's health ministry on Tuesday said that the mother of the child was a Congolese citizen married to a Ugandan.

She had travelled with the child and four other family members back home to nurse her father who eventually died from Ebola.

Uganda has been on high alert since the outbreak across a porous border in the eastern DRC, where more than 2,000 cases of the highly contagious virus have been recorded, two-thirds of which have been fatal.