The East African Community’s mobile laboratory network’s rapid response during the first 2 weeks of the Ebola Sudan virus disease (SVD) outbreak in Uganda and pandemic preparedness activities in South Sudan, Rwanda, Tanzania, Burundi, Kenya

### Summary box On 20 September 2022, the Ugandan Ministry of Health declared an Ebola Sudan virus disease (SVD) outbreak in the Mubende District of the country, with one confirmed SVD death and six probable deaths reported in the region since 1 September 2022.1 Since 2017, and with funding from the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development through the KfW Development Bank, the East African Community (EAC) together with the Bernhard-Nocht-Institute for Tropical Medicine established a network of nine mobile EAC laboratories embedded within the National Public Health Laboratories (NPHLs) of six EAC Partner States (Tanzania, Kenya, Burundi, Rwanda, South Sudan and Uganda).2 3 These field-deployable mobile laboratories have the capacity to diagnose risk group four pathogens, such as SVD. The EAC project was conceived in response to the West African Ebola epidemic and the EAC mobile laboratories were designed based on the blueprint of the European Mobile Laboratories (EMLabs, www.emlab.eu), which were successfully deployed to Guinea in 2015. One major difference to the EMLab project is that the EAC Mobile Laboratories …