Onjalazbroz- Testing the Foundation of Knowledge

PUBLIC HEALTH ASSESSMENT An Assessment of Kenya’s Community Protection Capacity for Bundibugyo Virus Disease On 5 October 2026, a Kenyan citizen who had lived in the Democratic Republic of Congo for seven years died of Bundibugyo virus disease at a Nairobi hospital. He had passed through Jomo Kenyatta International Airport two days earlier without being detected at screening. He travelled to a hospital by private means and received visitors in the ward for two to three days before the diagnosis was confirmed. Those visitors returned to their communities. The first Ebola burial in Kenya’s history was conducted on 6 October at the Islamic section of Lang’ata Cemetery, within approximately twenty-four hours of death, by a nine-member team operating under strict infection prevention protocols. On 14 October, a second case was confirmed — a family member of the first patient who had been under daily monitoring since the initial diagnosis. Kenya had been on heightened alert since May 2026, w...

Photo by Ghani Nurhakim      PUBLIC HEALTH ASSESSMENT An Assessment of Kenya’s Collaborative Surveillance for Bundibugyo Virus Disease — and Why the System Failed Its First Real Test The Night Everything Changed On the night of 5 October 2026, a Kenyan citizen who had lived in the Democratic Republic of Congo for seven years died in a Nairobi hospital of Bundibugyo virus disease. His journey had been long. He fell ill approximately a month earlier while in the DRC and was treated at several health facilities there. He travelled by road from Beni through Uganda, spent a night in Kampala, and flew to Nairobi on 3 October aboard Jambojet flight 8523. He underwent routine public health screening at the port health and immigration desks at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport. He was not detected. He was taken directly from the airport to a Nairobi hospital by a relative and a friend, where he was isolated after presenting with fever, chills, intense fatigue, muscle pain, painf...

ESSAY The Man Who Walked With Us: A Reflection on Raila Odinga I never met Raila Amollo Odinga. He never knew my name. And yet he walked with me through every stage of my life. I saw him through the eyes of a child, a teenager, a young man, and now a teacher. I loved him, I was angry with him, and in the end I learned that love and disagreement can live in the same heart. This is not a political eulogy. It is the story of growing up with Raila, and of what he meant to me. My earliest memory of Raila goes back to 1997. I was in Class Two, and Kenya was heading into a general election. Raila was vying under the National Development Party, whose symbol was a tractor. A song swept through the streets of Manyatta in Kisumu, where we lived: “Tinga onyono pier gweno ba gweno otore.” The tractor has crashed the cock. The tractor was NDP, and the cock was KANU, the party that had ruled since independence. To a child, politics wasn’t policy. It was story and song, something the adults around me...