Nigerian authorities are monitoring nearly 400 people for signs of Ebola after they came in contact with a Port Harcourt doctor who died of the disease but hid the fact that he had been exposed, a senior Nigerian health official said yesterday.

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 August 22, the Port Harcourt doctor, named by local authorities as 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.

Doctor who died of Ebola hid his exposure and infection

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 says.