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.