Nigeria Ebola Case Probed Over Airport Link to Kenya

Health officials are investigating whether the first Nigeria Ebola patient confirmed this week crossed paths with Kenya's first Ebola patient at a Ugandan airport earlier this month.

Nigeria announced its first case of Ebola in more than a decade on Tuesday. Nigerian health authorities said the patient is the Ugandan-born wife of a diplomat based in Abuja who had vacationed in Uganda in September and returned to Nigeria earlier this month. She is being treated in hospital, and 44 people she had close contact with have been quarantined, Dr. Wessam Mankoula, head of emergency preparedness and response at the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told a press briefing Thursday, as reported by NPR.

Both the first Nigerian case and the first Kenyan case left Entebbe International Airport on October 3, Mankoula said, and investigators are looking into whether they crossed paths there. He said officials were probing whether there had been "some sort of interaction between the two cases at the airport." Kenya's first patient, who has since died, had traveled from Congo to Kenya via Uganda. Kenya's health ministry confirmed its first case earlier this month and has reported eight more since. Patrick Amoth, the ministry's director-general, said officials had traced all 135 contacts of the first Kenyan case. Nigeria is tracing her contacts, with Mankoula adding that more have since been identified.

Conflicting accounts of her travel history

Where the woman contracted the virus remains unclear, and the accounts differ. Authorities in Uganda said she had traveled to eastern Congo before transiting through Uganda. But the World Health Organization and the Africa CDC said Thursday they had received no validated information that she traveled to Congo.

A Swiss government statement to the Reuters news agency said the patient, the wife of a Swiss diplomat, is believed to have contracted the disease while traveling in Uganda. Ugandan authorities rejected that suggestion: government spokesman Alan Kasujja told the AFP news agency it was "preposterous" to link Uganda to the case simply because she had holidayed there.

Jean Kaseya, the Africa CDC director general, said the agency had no validated information that the woman had been to Congo, and Pavel Ursu, the WHO representative in Nigeria, said the information given to the organization included no travel outside Uganda. Patrick Otim, a WHO emergency response manager, said Thursday the source of her infection was still unknown, with investigators looking at which Abuja health facilities she visited between the onset of symptoms and her hospitalization 48 hours later.

A more complex outbreak landscape

Nigeria is the fourth African country to record a case during the current outbreak, but it is the first in West Africa and the furthest yet from the epicenter in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It is also the most populous country affected so far, home to more than 200 million people, a detail that has sharpened concern among health officials tracking the response.

The outbreak began in May in the country's east and has become the fastest spreading on record. At least 4,600 people have died and about 9,700 have been infected in Congo, according to reporting from NPR. The country's own health authorities describe it as the deadliest outbreak in its history. Neighboring Uganda recorded 20 confirmed cases, including 15 imported from Congo, and 2 deaths, before it was declared Ebola-free in August.

The strain involved is Bundibugyo, for which no approved vaccine or treatment exists. The Africa CDC has warned of an "extremely serious threat," with the fatality rate in Congo approaching 50 percent. "We are facing a more complex outbreak landscape," Mohamed Janabi, the WHO regional director for Africa, told an online media briefing Thursday, as reported by Independent Press.

Ebola spreads through direct contact with an infected person's bodily fluids or contaminated items. It causes severe fever and can be deadly, though people are generally not considered infectious until they start showing symptoms, which makes the contact tracing now underway in Abuja and Nairobi the central tool for containment.