Ebola Reaches Nigeria as Officials Clash Over Patient's Travel Route

Nigeria has confirmed its first Ebola case in more than a decade, a development that adds a fourth African nation to an outbreak that has infected more than 9,500 people since mid-May and killed nearly half of them. Health authorities are attempting to determine how the patient was exposed, with conflicting accounts from Swiss and Ugandan officials. Nigeria's health minister, Muhammad Ali Pate, said contact-tracing is underway. "We are trying to contain it so it doesn't go out to the communities," he said.

The outbreak was first announced on 15 May in the Democratic Republic of Congo, then moved to Uganda, where cases were reported in May and June. The World Health Organization declared Uganda Ebola-free in August. Cases were subsequently confirmed in Kenya and Nigeria. The Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention is examining whether the Nigerian patient may have encountered an Ebola patient in Kenya.

The Swiss foreign ministry stated Friday that the patient is the Ugandan-born wife of a Swiss diplomat posted in Abuja. The ministry said she had not travelled to the DR Congo and likely contracted the virus while accompanying her husband in Uganda. That account conflicts with earlier statements from Uganda, which said the woman had travelled to eastern DR Congo. A Ugandan government spokesperson told Reuters on Thursday that the country had no Ebola cases and would disclose information if that changed.

Dr Wessam Mankoula, the Africa CDC's head of emergency preparedness and response, said both the Kenyan case and the Nigerian patient passed through Uganda's Entebbe airport on 3 October. Catherine Smallwood, a WHO Ebola incident manager in DR Congo, told a UN briefing in Geneva that WHO staff had no record of the Nigerian patient entering the DR Congo. She said a link to the Kenyan case is possible but requires comparing travel timing with the onset of the Nigerian patient's symptoms.

Marion Koopmans, a Dutch virologist on the WHO's Ebola emergency committee, questioned the airport theory. She called it "very speculative unless there is evidence of sharing the same space in a manner that could explain that," adding that presence at a large airport is "not a supported epidemiological link by any standard of what we currently know."

The current outbreak is caused by the Bundibugyo virus, for which no approved treatment or vaccine exists. It is the largest and deadliest outbreak in the DR Congo's history and the second largest globally, behind the 2014-16 west Africa epidemic that infected more than 28,600 people and killed more than 11,000. Melaku Yirga, vice-president for Africa at Prosper Global, formerly Mercy Corps, said confirmed cases in Kenya and Nigeria require cross-border information sharing without delay and resources for frontline health workers.