Ebola in Nigeria: 53 contacts monitored around the Abuja case
· BehindLines newsroom
Nigeria has widened the group of people under watch around its single confirmed Ebola case. On Sunday 25 October, Jide Idris, director general of the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), said 53 direct contacts were now being followed, up from 44 announced earlier in the week, according to an AFP report carried by The Manila Times.
The patient, a 42-year-old woman whose husband works for the Swiss embassy in Abuja, had spent time in Uganda before returning to Nigeria. Her infection was confirmed on 20 October. She is being treated in isolation and, for now, is the only person in the country to have tested positive.
According to the Nigerian daily Premium Times, 44 of the contacts are linked to the health facility where she was first cared for. The other nine were found through follow-up investigation: members of her household, her husband, her driver and her cook, as well as health workers and people who collected samples. None had symptoms at the time of the briefing. A suspected case reported in Rivers State turned out to be negative.
Each contact is monitored for 21 days after their last possible exposure, the longest incubation period used for this disease. Daily Trust reports that the authorities will also pay 100,000 naira a week to everyone placed in isolation or quarantine, so that nobody is pushed to break the measure in order to earn a living. Screening of travellers arriving at international airports has been stepped up.
This imported case belongs to a much wider epidemic. In its 23 October bulletin, the World Health Organization counted, as of 20 October, 9,704 confirmed cases and 4,687 deaths in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the Bundibugyo virus is circulating. Kenya has declared nine cases, one of them fatal, with no sign of wider community spread.
For people in Abuja, the risk stays limited as long as no contact falls ill: the virus passes through the body fluids of someone with symptoms, not through the air. The main concern is in hospitals, where health workers are the most exposed. The coming weeks will show whether tracing was fast enough. The gap between the patient's arrival and her diagnosis is exactly what the authorities are trying to cover by working back through the list of people she met.