In a statement released earlier on Tuesday, the World Health Organization said a 24-year-old man in Mubende had tested positive for "the relatively rare Sudan strain" of the virus.
"We want to inform the country that we have an outbreak of Ebola which we confirmed yesterday," Diana Atwine, the health ministry's permanent secretary, told a news conference.
"This follows an investigation by the National Rapid Response team of six suspicious deaths that have occurred in the district this month," WHO said.
"Uganda is no stranger to effective Ebola control. Thanks to its expertise, action has been taken to quickly to detect the virus and we can bank on this knowledge to halt the spread of infections," Matshidiso Moeti, WHO Africa's regional director, said..
There have been seven previous outbreaks of the Sudan strain, including four times in Uganda and thrice in Sudan, the WHO said.
The WHO said ring vaccination of high-risk people with the Ervebo vaccine had been highly effective in controlling the spread of Ebola in recent outbreaks in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and elsewhere but that this vaccine had only been approved to protect against the Zaire strain.
Uganda -- which shares a porous border with the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) -- has experienced several Ebola outbreaks in the past, most recently in 2019, when at least five people died.
The DRC last month recorded a new case in its violence-wracked east, less than six weeks after an epidemic in the country's northwest was declared over.
First identified in 1976 in the DRC (then Zaire), the virus, whose natural host is the bat, has since set off a series of epidemics in Africa, killing around 15,000 people.
Human transmission is through body fluids, with the main symptoms being fever, vomiting, bleeding and diarrhea.
Outbreaks are difficult to contain, especially in urban environments.
People who are infected do not become contagious until symptoms appear, which is after an incubation period of between two and 21 days.
At present there is no licensed medication to prevent or treat Ebola, although a range of experimental drugs are in development and thousands have been vaccinated in the DRC and some neighboring countries.
This report was prepared with information from Reuters and Agence France-Presse