Matthew Lukwiya

In February 2001, the American Medical Association named Lukwiya a role model. An annual Dr. Matthew Lukwiya Memorial Lecture began the year after his death. The lectures are sponsored by the World Health Organization and organised by the Uganda National Association of Community and Occupational Health.

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.

Margaret was finally called on Thursday afternoon and she arrived the next morning. However, Lukwiya's colleagues were strict in the protocols. While she was forced to sit on a stool three feet away from his bed, she was eventually allowed to hold his foot through three layers of glove. On Sunday, his breathing had become so laboured that he was put on a respirator. By early Monday evening the oxygen level of his blood was rising and his pulse was near normal. It appeared that he might pull through but later that evening Lukwiya's lungs began haemorrhaging, a worst-case scenario. Lukwiya died at 1:20 am on Tuesday, 5 December 2000. When Margaret was informed and came to the ward, the body had already been put into a polyethylene bag. When she asked if they could unzip it a little so she could have a last look, she was refused; the body was too infectious to take any risks.

Because of the risks, the burial was carried out at 4pm, as soon as it could be arranged. A team in full protective gear lowered the simple coffin, while one member continually sprayed the coffin and site with Jik bleach as a disinfectant. The location of the grave had been chosen by Lukwiya while he was in the isolation ward. It is next to the grave of Dr. Lucille Teasdale, the cofounder of hospital and a mentor and friend. Teasdale had died in 1996 from AIDS, contracted after she performed surgery on an HIV-positive patient. Among the hundreds of mourners who were warned to stay back until the burial was complete were Lukwiya's children and numerous government officials, including the Minister of Health, who had rushed from Kampala after receiving word that morning.

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.

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.

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.

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.