The Nigerian government is monitoring nearly 400 people for signs of
Ebola after they came in contact with a Port Harcourt doctor, who died
of the disease, Reuters reported on Thursday.Dr. Abdulsalami Nasidi, project director at Nigeria Centre for
Disease Control, said there was a sense of “hopelessness” due to the
lack of proven drugs or vaccines to treat Ebola that has infected 18
people in Africa’s most populous nation.
In
an interview with Reuters in Geneva, he said that more isolation wards
were being opened in the oil industry hub but voiced confidence that
there would not be “many cases” there.
After having contact with an Ebola patient and before his own death
on Aug. 22, the Port Harcourt doctor, Iyke Enemuo, carried on treating
patients and met scores of friends, relatives and medics, leaving about
60 of them at high risk of infection, the World Health Organisation said
on Wednesday.The doctor’s wife, who is also a physician, and a patient in the same hospital have been infected with Ebola, the WHO said.
“Everything about this doctor was in secrecy, he violated our public
health laws by treating a patient with a highly pathogenic agent who
revealed to him that he had contact with Ebola and didn’t want to be
treated in Lagos because he might be put in isolation”, Nasidi said.“He treated him in secrecy outside hospital premises. When he became
ill, he did not reveal to his colleagues that he had contact with
someone who contracted Ebola. He was taken to General Hospital, a
private hospital that sees everybody.“That is the only case that effectively escaped our surveillance network. We are paying now for it”, Nasidi said.He spoke on the sidelines of a two-day WHO experts meeting aimed at speeding development of Ebola drugs and vaccines.The deadly virus can be spread by direct contact with body fluids and
secretions of an infected person or during traditional burial rituals,
the WHO said.The latest outbreak, which has spread from Guinea to Liberia, Sierra
Leone, Nigeria, and Senegal and, with the death toll at more than 1,900
people as of Wednesday, has killed more people than all outbreaks since
Ebola was first uncovered in 1976.
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