Ebola in Nigeria: infection may have originated in Uganda
By the AFREEQUE newsroom, based on TimesLIVE
Health authorities are trying to establish where Nigeria’s first Ebola patient in more than a decade was infected, as the disease has been reported in four African countries. Switzerland’s foreign ministry believes she may have contracted the virus in Uganda, but the WHO is continuing its investigation to determine the source of the infection, TimesLIVE reports.
Switzerland believes that the first Ebola patient in Nigeria in more than a decade probably contracted the virus in Uganda, where she had spent two weeks with her husband before returning to Abuja. The Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs said on Friday that the Ugandan national, who is married to a Swiss diplomat posted in Nigeria, had not travelled to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), according to TimesLIVE.
The World Health Organization (WHO) and African health authorities are continuing their investigations, however, as Ugandan authorities have said the patient had been in eastern DRC before travelling through Uganda. The WHO declared Uganda free of Ebola in August, and Nigeria tested the patient 13 days after her symptoms appeared in Abuja, according to TimesLIVE.
Another hypothesis being examined links the Nigerian patient to the first confirmed case in Kenya: both people are said to have left Entebbe airport in Uganda on 3 October, before the Kenyan patient died two days later in Nairobi. Dutch virologist Marion Koopmans nevertheless described the link as speculative in the absence of evidence of contact in a shared space, while the WHO representative in Kenya, Neema Rusibamayila Kimambo, suggested it could be a coincidence.
The search for the source of the infection follows analyses of the Nigerian case, published on 22 October. It comes as the outbreak that began in the DRC has reached four African countries, an expansion described as the widest geographical spread ever observed for an Ebola outbreak on the continent, according to TimesLIVE.
