Earlier today, the Ministry of Health confirmed Kenya’s first imported case of Ebola Bundibugyo virus disease.

The patient had lived in the Democratic Republic of Congo for seven years, fell ill about a month earlier, and traveled home through Uganda by road.

He flew into Jomo Kenyatta International Airport on Saturday, October 3, was taken to Nairobi Hospital, tested positive, and died on Monday night.

Counting from the airport, that is three days of movement through a city before the diagnosis was confirmed. Every person he touched or sat near in that window is a possible link in a chain, and finding them quickly is the whole game now.

This is the job Kenya’s outbreak digital tracking tool, ADaM, was built for.

ADaM stands for All-Disease Outbreak Module. ICAP in Kenya built it with support from the US CDC and in collaboration with the Ministry of Health.

It handles case investigation, contact tracing, lab results, location data, and dashboards in one system, instead of spreading them across separate field tools. It runs on a computer, tablet, or phone, with or without internet.

It has a track record. It was first used in February 2024 during a Rift Valley Fever outbreak in Marsabit County, where it helped investigate more than 50 cases. It was then used in the 2024-25 mpox response, where 143 cases had been tracked by February 18, 2025.

The Ministry’s Division of Disease Surveillance and Response has made it the only tool for outbreak tracking, and ICAP had trained over 450 ministry staff across 16 counties as of that reporting.

It’s worth mentioning that the MoH has not publicly declared ADaM is being used in this Ebola response. However, since it is the Ministry’s sole outbreak tracking tool, it is a reasonable bet that it will be used, but what follows describes what it can do, not confirmed deployment.

  • Tracking the 28 contacts, and the next ones: The Ministry has identified 28 contacts so far, including family members and health workers who treated the patient. Ebola contacts have to be followed for a set period after exposure, since symptoms can appear up to 21 days later. Each contact needs regular check-ins and a quick escalation if a fever shows up. ADaM’s contact tracing function exists to keep that list organized and current, so nobody drops off it.
  • Chasing a scattered group: The 23 passengers and four crew on the Jambojet flight went home across the country, possibly further. They need to be found, assessed, and put into follow-up. Location data and mapping help the response team see where contacts are and send teams to them, rather than working from a spreadsheet of phone numbers.
  • Mapping exposure sites: The patient’s route is unusually well documented: the airport, the flight, a Toyota Fielder with relatives and friends, Nairobi Hospital, and a burial. ADaM’s mapping lets surveillance staff plot sites like these and spot where the risk is concentrated. In the Rift Valley Fever outbreak, this kind of mapping showed the spread pattern and led to targeted community outreach.
  • Connecting lab results to cases: The diagnosis was confirmed by both the National Virology Reference Laboratory and KEMRI. Any later suspected case will need a quick link between the sample, the lab result, and the person’s contact history. Gaps between lab results and field data were one of the problems ADaM was designed to fix after COVID-19.
  • Working outside good internet: Contact follow-up happens in homes, villages, and clinics, not only in Nairobi. Since ADaM works offline, teams can keep recording data when the signal is bad.
  • Giving decision makers one picture: Dashboards pull case counts, contacts, and locations together, so the people planning the response are not waiting for someone to compile numbers by hand. Ebola changes by the hour, so this is important.

ADaM does not find contacts on its own. It records what people tell health workers, so its value depends on honest answers, trained staff, and data entered promptly.

The 4,971 health workers the Ministry of Health says it has trained on Ebola prevention and management will matter as much as any software.

Speed matters more here because the licensed Ebola vaccine, Ervebo, targets the Zaire species and not Bundibugyo. With no approved vaccine for this species, finding contacts early, isolating those who develop symptoms, and burying the dead safely are the main defenses.

Kenya now has a single, tested system for exactly this kind of problem, and a case where the key facts (flight, vehicle, hospital, contacts) are already known.

The next few weeks will show whether the tracing keeps up with the movement. The thing to watch is how many contacts are followed to the end of their monitoring period without gaps.