Nigeria's first confirmed Ebola case in the current outbreak is the wife of a diplomat who went to Kampala on holiday, according to Dr Jean Kaseya, he
Nigeria’s first confirmed Ebola case in the current outbreak is the wife of a diplomat who went to Kampala on holiday, according to Dr Jean Kaseya, head of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.
The woman is originally from Uganda but lives in Abuja, where she fell ill three days after returning on 3 October.
Nigeria’s Health Minister, Muhammad Ali Pate, confirmed that the 42-year-old spent two and a half weeks in Kampala and had a two-hour stopover in Addis Ababa on her way back.
Tests identified the Bundibugyo strain, the same one behind a major outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The patient’s condition has improved, but the timeline has raised concerns. She first developed symptoms on 6 October and, believing she had malaria, went to a private hospital.
She was admitted to a health facility on 11 October. Nigerian physician Ayoade Alakija noted that it took 12 days from the onset of her illness before she was tested, which could have exposed many other people, including her Swiss husband.
Pate said 44 contacts have been identified, though not all were in proximity to her, and none of them, including the person who travelled with her, have developed symptoms.
Accounts of her movements conflict. Uganda’s Director-General of Health Services, Charles Olaro, described her as a Nigerian national who travelled to eastern DR Congo for business and merely passed through Uganda.
Kampala maintains that the country has no active confirmed Ebola cases and that transit through Uganda does not show she caught the virus there. Uganda declared itself free of the disease in August.
Nigeria is now working with Uganda, Ethiopia and Africa CDC to establish where she travelled and where she might have been infected. Nigeria contained an earlier outbreak in 2014, recording 20 confirmed cases and eight deaths.
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