Nigeria evacuates Ebola patient to Switzerland, tracks 53 contacts

The only confirmed case in Nigeria of Africa's latest deadly Ebola outbreak was evacuated Monday by air from Abuja, the capital, to Switzerland, where she has citizenship. Nigeria has stepped up contact-tracing and screenings at airports.

The patient, 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. Her condition was "much improved, stable, conscious, communicating, and her clinical laboratory test results closing towards baseline", said Nigerian health minister Muhammad Ali Pate in a statement.

"This does not mean she is not still infectious," he added. Fifty-three of the patient's contacts have been identified by the Nigerian health authorities.

The World Health Organization has warned that Africa is facing a "complex" Ebola outbreak, with the virus now present in the west, east and centre of the continent.

53 primary contacts

The outbreak of the Bundibugyo strain of the virus, for which there is no vaccine or specific treatment, has been ravaging the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which has recorded more than 4,600 deaths since May. Health authorities in Nigeria, Africa's most populous country, successfully stemmed a previous Ebola outbreak a dozen years ago.

But some experts are worried about how much the illness could have spread in the time between the woman's arrival on October 3 and her diagnosis, announced October 20.

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.

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.

Enhanced screening

Nigerian authorities have announced enhanced screenings for international airport arrivals. At the land border with Benin, health forms were generic, asking about fevers but not mentioning Ebola and without temperature checks, an AFP reporter observed.

Another AFP reporter saw people receiving temperature checks at a Lagos-area beach resort. Domestic flights are not conducting screening measures.

Nigeria last week announced west Africa's first case from an outbreak ravaging Democratic Republic of the Congo - an imported case of the Bundibugyo strain, for which there is no vaccine or specific treatment. The DRC has recorded more than 4,600 deaths since it declared its 17th Ebola outbreak in May. Uganda has had 20 cases, including two deaths, on its territory but the World Health Organization officially declared it Ebola-free. Almost all the cases were people who had visited DRC.

Uganda said Sunday its nationals returning from DRC would have to spend 21 days in quarantine. Ebola is transmitted through contact with bodily fluids and causes severe haemorrhagic fever. Kenya has reported two deaths this month.

The country had not reported a single case until a Kenyan man who had been living in DRC died after returning home.

The second death was a close contact of the man, authorities said. As of Friday the country had seven Ebola cases in isolation.