The World Health Organization says the Ebola outbreak that began in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has grown into a “more complex outbreak landscape”, with active or recent cases now present in three African countries and Nigeria among them.
“We are facing a more complex outbreak landscape,” Mohamed Janabi, the WHO regional director for Africa, told an online media briefing on Thursday, October 22. Cases of the same Bundibugyo strain stand in the DRC, Kenya and Nigeria. The outbreak, first announced in the DRC in mid-May, has killed more than 4,000 people out of more than 9,000 confirmed cases, making it the deadliest in the country’s history. Uganda recorded cases earlier in the year but has been declared Ebola-free since August.
Nigeria confirmed its first case, an imported infection in a Ugandan-born woman married to a Swiss diplomat based in Abuja, on Tuesday, October 21, becoming the fourth African country affected by this outbreak. Health Minister Muhammad Ali Pate said on Thursday that contacts traced since her arrival had been followed and that an undisclosed number of high-risk individuals had been “quarantined, fully, in a facility”.
Investigators are still working to establish where the Abuja patient was infected. Ugandan authorities said she had travelled to eastern DRC before passing through Uganda, but Africa CDC Director General Jean Kaseya said on Thursday that no confirmed information showed she went to the DRC, and a Swiss government statement indicated she was believed to have contracted the disease while travelling in Uganda.
Wessam Mankoula, head of emergency preparedness and response at Africa CDC, said both Nigeria’s first case and Kenya’s first patient left Entebbe airport on October 3, and investigators are examining whether the two crossed paths. Uganda rejected any suggestion the patient was infected there. “It’s preposterous to suggest that just because someone was holidaying in Uganda, which by the way has no cases of Ebola, is reason enough to drag us into a conversation about Ebola in Nigeria,” government spokesman Alan Kasujja told AFP.
The WHO representative in Nigeria, Pavel Ursu, said the patient arrived in Abuja on October 3 after being in Uganda from September 16, flying on an Ethiopian Airlines flight that transited through Addis Ababa. She is receiving treatment at a private hospital and showing “positive signs”, according to Ursu, though an NCDC official had said a day earlier that she experienced multiple organ failure. Uganda recorded 20 cases during this outbreak, almost all in people who had travelled from the DRC.
The WHO warning followed NaijaTrend’s earlier report here: here Nigeria’s case has since turned attention to airport screening, the movement of the 44 identified contacts and a federal order placing them on a no-fly list for at least 21 days.
Sources: Punch, TVC News, Al Jazeera
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