Abuja (AFP) – Nigeria has widened a hunt for potential Ebola cases, with an additional nine contacts traced, health authorities said Sunday.
"As of now, we have 53 primary contacts," said Nigeria Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (NCDC) boss Jide Idris.
The count was up from 44 people who had come in contact with a woman who fell ill with Ebola in the Nigerian capital Abuja.
The woman, the 42-year-old wife of a Swiss embassy staff worker based in Abuja, had been travelling in Uganda with her husband before returning to Nigeria. She is receiving treatment and remains the only confirmed case.
A test on a suspected case, in Rivers State, in the Niger Delta, came back negative, Idris told reporters.
The initial 44 contacts were health care workers, while the additional nine comprise more health staff as well as members of the infected woman's family and household staff, Idris said.
The World Health Organization has warned that Africa is facing a "complex" Ebola outbreak with the virus now present in west, east and central Africa.
Health authorities in Nigeria successfully stemmed a previous Ebola outbreak a decade ago but some experts are worried about how much the illness could have spread in the time between the woman's arrival -- October 3 -- and her diagnosis, announced Tuesday.
...
xiao yun
sh.itjust.works
xiao@sh.itjust.works