Nigeria Confirms Ebola Infection, Africa CDC Calls Crisis Summit

The Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) on Wednesday scheduled an “extraordinary virtual meeting” for October 28 to discuss the Ebola outbreak after Nigeria reported its first confirmed infection.

Africa CDC director Dr. Jean Kaseya said the virtual meeting would “strengthen our collective response” to the still-spreading Ebola Bundibugyo outbreak, which officially began in May in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) – although health experts believe it actually started earlier, with infections that were never reported or officially confirmed.

“Ebola is now affecting three regions of Africa. The situation demands urgent action and political leadership at the highest level,” Kaseya warned, describing the Bundibugyo outbreak as “the most geographically extensive in history.”

Nigerian officials said their first confirmed case is a foreign national who entered the country on October 5, and was originally diagnosed with malaria on October 11. When she did not respond to malaria treatments, her doctors decided to test her for Ebola, and she came up positive on October 19.

The rare Bundibugyo strain of Ebola can be difficult to detect, because test kits designed for the more common strains do not work, and casual body temperature scans can fail if the patient has been taking over-the-counter fever medications.

Nigeria Center for Disease Control assistant director Odianosen Ehiakhamen said on Tuesday that 44 contacts of the Ebola patient have been traced, including health care workers and her husband, who was described as a Swiss national who lives in Abuja. The BBC said her husband is a “diplomat.”

Nigerian health officials said they are also contract-tracing passengers and crew who flew with the patient aboard Ethiopian Airlines, but they do not believe she was symptomatic during her flights.

A senior public health official in Nigeria told reporters on Tuesday that the Ebola patient is a resident of Kenya’s capital city of Abuja who was “originally from Uganda.” He implied that she could have contracted the disease when she made a “quick travel to Uganda” recently.

Nigerian Health Minister Ali Muhammad Pate explicitly stated that his agency “presumed” the patient’s infection “was likely picked up in Uganda.”

Ugandan health officials, who have taken pride in saying their early infections were quickly isolated and there has been no further spread of the disease, hotly disputed suggestions that the Nigerian patient contracted Ebola while visiting Uganda.

The Ugandan health ministry issued a statement on Tuesday that said the patient from Nigeria merely “transited through Uganda,” and there was no evidence that she contracted the disease on Ugandan soil.

The ministry pointed out that the World Health Organization (W.H.O.) said Uganda was Ebola-free in August, and while Uganda logged about 20 infections early in the outbreak, no new cases have been reported since June.

W.H.O. protocols require 42 days to pass without a reported infection before a country can be certified as free of Ebola. The incubation period for Ebola ranges from 2 to 21 days.

“We wish to clarify that, as at the time of this statement, Uganda has no confirmed active Ebola cases,” the Ugandan Health Ministry said. “Travel through Uganda does not establish that infection occurred here. The location of exposure remains under investigation.”

“The government of Nigeria is yet to provide detailed information on her travel itinerary and clinical history, which will guide further investigations and any necessary contact tracing,” the Ugandan ministry added, perhaps a bit peevishly.

Another reason Uganda tends to be defensive about the current Ebola outbreak is that the Bundibugyo strain is named after the town in Uganda where it was first detected in 2007. There have been no infections reported near Bundibugyo during the current outbreak.

Meanwhile, Kenya confirmed another Ebola infection on Sunday, bringing its total of known cases to eight.

“Today, 38 people were tested, and one tested positive for Ebola. He is a 49-year-old man ​who is not a healthcare worker. He developed ​fever, headache and muscle pain,” Kenyan Health Ministry director Dr. Patrick Amoth said in a television interview.

Amoth later said the patient had a job cleaning utensils and linen for Ebola patients, and might have caught the disease while attending to Kenya’s first confirmed Ebola patient of the current outbreak. That patient died on October 5.

The DRC Health Ministry said two cases of Ebola have been recorded in a previously untroubled province called Nord-Ubangi, on the border of the Central African Republic (CAR). The new cases mean Ebola has now been detected in eight of the DRC’s provinces. Over 9,400 infections have been reported since mid-May, with over 4,500 fatalities.

“We see pockets of Ebola generally going down, but unfortunately geographically it’s spreading out,” remarked W.H.O.’s regional director for Africa, Mohamed Yakub Janabi.