Nigeria’s Ebola patient may have been infected in Uganda, Switzerland says
By the AFREEQUE newsroom, based on Sowetan
Health authorities are trying to determine where the Nigerian patient contracted Ebola after Switzerland said she had not travelled to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The woman, the Ugandan wife of a Swiss diplomat based in Abuja, may have been infected in Uganda, where she stayed for two weeks, according to Swiss authorities and health bodies cited by Sowetan.
The Swiss government believes that Nigeria’s first Ebola patient in more than ten years probably contracted the virus in Uganda, where she had travelled with her husband. Switzerland’s Federal Department of Foreign Affairs said on Friday that she had not travelled to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sowetan reports.
Ugandan authorities said the woman had travelled to eastern DR Congo before transiting through Uganda. The World Health Organisation (WHO) and the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention have not confirmed this account. The WHO is continuing its investigation to determine the source of the infection.
The patient, the Ugandan wife of a Swiss diplomat based in Abuja, had spent two weeks in Uganda before returning to Nigeria. Nigerian authorities tested her 13 days after her symptoms began. The possibility of undetected transmission in Uganda is worrying health officials, as the WHO had declared the country free of Ebola in August.
One line of inquiry concerns Kenya’s first confirmed case: the two patients reportedly left Entebbe airport on the same day, in early October. Dutch virologist Marion Koopmans, a member of the WHO emergency committee, described this hypothesis as speculative in the absence of evidence that they had shared a space in conditions allowing transmission. The WHO representative in Kenya, Neema Rusibamayila Kimambo, also said that their departure on 3 October could have been a coincidence, Sowetan reports.
This hypothesis adds to information already published about the patient’s two-week stay in Uganda and her not travelling to DR Congo, announced by Switzerland on 23 October in an article about the Ebola patient in Nigeria.
