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.

Biography 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.

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. While the survivability rate in previous Ebola outbreaks was as low as 10%, the Ugandan outbreak had a survivability of nearly 50%, an increase partially attributable to better health care. Lukwiya was the last health worker at St. Mary's to die from Ebola. Foreign epidemiologists credit Lukwiya with accelerating the government's public education campaign to stop the spread of the disease with his phone call to Kampala on 8 October. The number of lives possibly saved by this quick action is variously numbered in the hundreds to the thousands.