Community hub
Recent from talks
Knowledge base stats:
Talk channels stats:
Members stats:
Matthew Lukwiya
Matthew Lukwiya (24 November 1957 – 5 December 2000) was a Ugandan physician and the supervisor of St. Mary's Hospital Lacor, outside of Gulu. He was at the forefront of the 2000 Ebola virus disease outbreak in Uganda until he died from the disease.
Lukwiya, an ethnic Acholi, grew up in the town of Kitgum. His father, a fishmonger, drowned when Lukwiya was 12. His mother was a petty trader who smuggled tea across the border with Sudan to trade for soap. Lukwiya was one of four sons. While his mother started teaching him how to smuggle goods by bicycle, Lukwiya began to prove himself to be an extraordinary student. He came in at the top of his class in grade school, received the top school-leaving marks in the country, going on to attend university and medical school through a series of scholarships. He took a position as a medical intern at St. Mary's, a Catholic missionary hospital, in 1983.
After three months, the founders of the hospital, Dr. Piero Corti and his wife Lucille Teasdale-Corti, had decided that he would be their successor. He soon came to be known to his colleagues and patients as "Dr. Matthew". Many patients were victims of attacks by the rebel Lord's Resistance Army. On Good Friday 1989, the rebels came to St. Mary's to abduct several Italian nuns. Lukwiya managed to convince the rebels to take him instead and spent a week wandering through the brush in his physician's gown until the rebels released him. He subsequently opened the gates of the hospital compound to people seeking a place to sleep that was safe from rebel attacks and abduction. Until the Ebola outbreak, 9000 people sought sanctuary on the hospital grounds nightly to sleep. In a later incident, Lukwiya, his wife Margaret and five children were lying in bed one evening listening to nearby fighting between the rebels and government forces when a mortar shell crashed through the ceiling of their house, but failed to explode. He also played an unpublicised role in advocating for a peaceful solution to the war.
In 1990, Lukwiya earned a scholarship to earn a master's degree in tropical paediatrics in Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. Despite being offered a teaching position at the school, where he earned the best marks in the school's history, he appears to have never considered any other option than returning to St. Mary's. Under Lukwiya's administration the hospital tripled its capacity to 18,000 patients annually, included wounded from both sides of the conflict, and a further 500 out-patients daily. St. Mary's became easily the best hospital in northern Uganda, arguably the best in the country and one of the top hospitals in East Africa. In December 1998, Lukwiya moved his family to the capital city, Kampala, far from the violence of the northern war. There he sought a master's in public health at Makerere University, leaving the running of the hospital to colleague Cyprian Opira. In 1999, Lukwiya, always a church-going Protestant, took his born-again wife to a Pentecostal church and declared that he too was born again.
On the morning of 7 October 2000, Lukwiya received a phone call from Opira informing him that a mysterious illness had killed two of the hospital's student nurses, all of whom had begun bleeding or vomiting blood. Opira asked Lukwiya for help and he arrived that evening, in time to witness the death of a third nursing student, Daniel Ayella. He had head nurse Sister Maria Di Santo bring him the charts of all unusual deaths in the past two weeks and identified 17 cases with similar symptoms. Lukwiya and Sr. Maria spent most of that night reading reports from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO) on infectious diseases that caused bleeding. By the end of their review, they suspected Ebola. The literature on Ebola, largely based on a 1995 outbreak in Kikwit, Congo that had killed four (4) out of five (5) patients, stated that the sicker a patient, the more infectious they became. Dead bodies themselves were highly contagious. Lukwiya immediately recognised this as a particular problem in Acholiland, where the traditional practice was for the bereaved family to wash the body of the deceased before burial.
On the morning of 8 October, Lukwiya informed staff of his suspicion that the illness was a viral haemorrhagic fever. That afternoon, a group of local community leaders came to the hospital reporting that entire families were dying in their villages. He ignored the usual bureaucratic protocols and placed a direct call to Dr. Sam Okware, Uganda's Commissioner of Community Health Services, who dispatched a team from the Uganda Virus Research Institute to take blood samples. By the time the team arrived, Lukwiya had already set up an isolation ward for suspected Ebola cases, in line with the WHO guidelines. The special ward was staffed by three physicians, five nurses and five nursing assistants, all volunteers. When a South African lab confirmed the Ebola outbreak on 15 October, and a WHO delegation arrived in Gulu, they were astonished at the efficiency of the operation. Dr. Simon Mardel, a member of the WHO team, stated,[citation needed]
I had thought people would be unwilling to work. I thought we would be facing a situation where patients were totally neglected and an isolation ward to which people wouldn't want to come because it would just be a mortuary
But they had implemented the manual – a very specialized recipe. They were giving highly sophisticated care. It was remarkable. There was even a little wooden device for pulling boots off they had made, exactly as the manual describes.
Finding that their assistance was not required at St. Mary's, the WHO and Médecins Sans Frontières rapid response teams offered their assistance at Gulu Regional Referral Hospital, where they found corpses abandoned in their hospital beds.
Hub AI
Matthew Lukwiya AI simulator
(@Matthew Lukwiya_simulator)
Matthew Lukwiya
Matthew Lukwiya (24 November 1957 – 5 December 2000) was a Ugandan physician and the supervisor of St. Mary's Hospital Lacor, outside of Gulu. He was at the forefront of the 2000 Ebola virus disease outbreak in Uganda until he died from the disease.
Lukwiya, an ethnic Acholi, grew up in the town of Kitgum. His father, a fishmonger, drowned when Lukwiya was 12. His mother was a petty trader who smuggled tea across the border with Sudan to trade for soap. Lukwiya was one of four sons. While his mother started teaching him how to smuggle goods by bicycle, Lukwiya began to prove himself to be an extraordinary student. He came in at the top of his class in grade school, received the top school-leaving marks in the country, going on to attend university and medical school through a series of scholarships. He took a position as a medical intern at St. Mary's, a Catholic missionary hospital, in 1983.
After three months, the founders of the hospital, Dr. Piero Corti and his wife Lucille Teasdale-Corti, had decided that he would be their successor. He soon came to be known to his colleagues and patients as "Dr. Matthew". Many patients were victims of attacks by the rebel Lord's Resistance Army. On Good Friday 1989, the rebels came to St. Mary's to abduct several Italian nuns. Lukwiya managed to convince the rebels to take him instead and spent a week wandering through the brush in his physician's gown until the rebels released him. He subsequently opened the gates of the hospital compound to people seeking a place to sleep that was safe from rebel attacks and abduction. Until the Ebola outbreak, 9000 people sought sanctuary on the hospital grounds nightly to sleep. In a later incident, Lukwiya, his wife Margaret and five children were lying in bed one evening listening to nearby fighting between the rebels and government forces when a mortar shell crashed through the ceiling of their house, but failed to explode. He also played an unpublicised role in advocating for a peaceful solution to the war.
In 1990, Lukwiya earned a scholarship to earn a master's degree in tropical paediatrics in Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. Despite being offered a teaching position at the school, where he earned the best marks in the school's history, he appears to have never considered any other option than returning to St. Mary's. Under Lukwiya's administration the hospital tripled its capacity to 18,000 patients annually, included wounded from both sides of the conflict, and a further 500 out-patients daily. St. Mary's became easily the best hospital in northern Uganda, arguably the best in the country and one of the top hospitals in East Africa. In December 1998, Lukwiya moved his family to the capital city, Kampala, far from the violence of the northern war. There he sought a master's in public health at Makerere University, leaving the running of the hospital to colleague Cyprian Opira. In 1999, Lukwiya, always a church-going Protestant, took his born-again wife to a Pentecostal church and declared that he too was born again.
On the morning of 7 October 2000, Lukwiya received a phone call from Opira informing him that a mysterious illness had killed two of the hospital's student nurses, all of whom had begun bleeding or vomiting blood. Opira asked Lukwiya for help and he arrived that evening, in time to witness the death of a third nursing student, Daniel Ayella. He had head nurse Sister Maria Di Santo bring him the charts of all unusual deaths in the past two weeks and identified 17 cases with similar symptoms. Lukwiya and Sr. Maria spent most of that night reading reports from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO) on infectious diseases that caused bleeding. By the end of their review, they suspected Ebola. The literature on Ebola, largely based on a 1995 outbreak in Kikwit, Congo that had killed four (4) out of five (5) patients, stated that the sicker a patient, the more infectious they became. Dead bodies themselves were highly contagious. Lukwiya immediately recognised this as a particular problem in Acholiland, where the traditional practice was for the bereaved family to wash the body of the deceased before burial.
On the morning of 8 October, Lukwiya informed staff of his suspicion that the illness was a viral haemorrhagic fever. That afternoon, a group of local community leaders came to the hospital reporting that entire families were dying in their villages. He ignored the usual bureaucratic protocols and placed a direct call to Dr. Sam Okware, Uganda's Commissioner of Community Health Services, who dispatched a team from the Uganda Virus Research Institute to take blood samples. By the time the team arrived, Lukwiya had already set up an isolation ward for suspected Ebola cases, in line with the WHO guidelines. The special ward was staffed by three physicians, five nurses and five nursing assistants, all volunteers. When a South African lab confirmed the Ebola outbreak on 15 October, and a WHO delegation arrived in Gulu, they were astonished at the efficiency of the operation. Dr. Simon Mardel, a member of the WHO team, stated,[citation needed]
I had thought people would be unwilling to work. I thought we would be facing a situation where patients were totally neglected and an isolation ward to which people wouldn't want to come because it would just be a mortuary
But they had implemented the manual – a very specialized recipe. They were giving highly sophisticated care. It was remarkable. There was even a little wooden device for pulling boots off they had made, exactly as the manual describes.
Finding that their assistance was not required at St. Mary's, the WHO and Médecins Sans Frontières rapid response teams offered their assistance at Gulu Regional Referral Hospital, where they found corpses abandoned in their hospital beds.