Nigeria was declared free of the deadly Ebola virus yesterday after a determined doctor and thousands of officials and volunteers helped end an outbreak still ravaging other parts of West Africa and threatening the United States and Spain.
Caught unawares when a diplomat arrived with the disease from Liberia, authorities were alerted by Doctor Ameyo Adadevoh, who kept him in her hospital despite protests from him and his government, and later she herself died from the disease.
Ebola is much more contagious once symptoms become severe
They then set about trying to contain it in an overcrowded city of 21 million where it could easily have turned a doomsday scenario if about 300 people who had been in direct or indirect contact with him were not been traced and isolated.
“This is a spectacular success story,” Rui Gama Vaz from the World Health Organisation (WHO) told a news conference in the capital Abuja, where officials broke into applause when he announced that Nigeria had shaken off the disease.
“It shows that Ebola can be contained, but we must be clear that we have only won a battle, the war will only end when West Africa is also declared free of Ebola.”
This year’s outbreak of the highly infectious haemorrhagic fever thought to have originated in forest bats is the worst on record.
It has killed 4,546 people across the three most-affected countries, Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone and travellers have from the region have infected two people in Texas and one in Madrid.
It was imported to Nigeria when Liberian-American diplomat Patrick Sawyer collapsed at the main international airport in Lagos on July 20. Airport staff were unprepared and the government had not set up any hospital isolation unit, so he was able to infect several people, including health workers in the hospital where he was taken, some of whom had to restrain him to keep him there.
Lagos, the commercial hub of Africa’s most populous nation, largest economy and leading energy producer, would have been an ideal springboard for Ebola to spread across the country.
“Nigeria was not really prepared for the outbreak, but the swift response from the federal government, state governments and international organisations ... was essential,” said Samuel Matoka, Ebola operations manager in Nigeria for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies .
The US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, which was involved in managing the outbreak, said officials and volunteers reached more than 26,000 households of people living around the contacts of the Ebola patients.
Adadevoh, doctor at the First Consultants hospital in Lagos where Sawyer was brought, prevented the dying man from spreading it further, Benjamin Ohiaeri, a doctor there who survived the disease, old Reuters.
Ebola is much more contagious once symptoms become severe.
“We agreed that the thing to do was not to let him out of the hospital,” Ohiaeri said, even after he became aggressive and demanded to be set free.
“If we had let him out, within 24 hours of being here, he would have contacted and infected a lot more people.”
Sawyer was reported only to have malaria, Ohiaeri said. But Adadevoh noticed he had bloodshot eyes and was passing blood in his urine — telltale signs of hemorrhagic fever. She left instructions by his bed that under no circumstances should anyone let him leave.
At one point, Sawyer ripped off his intravenous tube and a nurse had to put it back. She later got infected and died.