Follow-Up: Africa CDC Sends Leading Ebola Scientists to Nigeria to Trace a Case's Origin: Patient Never Visited Congo and May Have Crossed Paths With the Kenya Case at Entebbe Airport
A team of leading Ebola scientists will travel to Abuja, Nigeria, to investigate how the country's first confirmed Ebola patient in more than a decade contracted the virus, Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) Director-General Jean Kaseya told Reuters in an interview in London on Monday, October 26. The patient — the Ugandan-born wife of a Swiss diplomat based in Abuja — had not visited the Democratic Republic of Congo, the epicentre of the ongoing Bundibugyo Ebola outbreak, according to her travel records.
Nigeria confirmed the woman's Bundibugyo infection on October 20, and GSM has previously reported her identity and the virus strain. Finding out how she became ill matters to ensure the outbreak — already the second-largest Ebola epidemic on record — is not spreading silently in as-yet undiscovered locations, and to help trace and isolate all contacts. "We have so many unknowns," Kaseya said. "I'm bringing a group of scientists in Abuja because… we need to be led by science."
One theory the scientists will investigate is a potential link to Kenya's first case, reported earlier this month in a man who had travelled from Congo and has since died. Genomic sequencing on Friday showed the viruses that infected the two patients were closely related. The Nigerian patient had been on holiday in Uganda and travelled through Entebbe International Airport on October 3; the Kenyan patient was likely at the airport at the same time, their flights about 40 minutes apart, although they did not depart from the same gate and it is not clear whether they had any contact.
Kaseya stressed that genomic similarity does not mean one patient directly infected the other. The Abuja patient, whose condition is improving, has said she does not remember meeting the Kenya patient. Ebola spreads through direct contact with the bodily fluids of an infected person displaying symptoms, and investigators are also considering whether an unidentified intermediary facilitated transmission.
For context, GSM has previously reported Congolese health authorities' October 20 figures of 9,704 confirmed cases and 4,687 deaths in the Democratic Republic of Congo in this outbreak, which was declared on May 15 and later listed by the WHO as a public health emergency of international concern, with cases reported in four African countries.
Source: GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：位于乌干达的 Entebbe 国际机场航站楼（资料图）——两名患者10月3日或曾同在此机场。照片：PetterLundkvist，CC BY 3.0，经 Wikimedia Commons。 / Photo: The terminal of Entebbe International Airport in Uganda (file photo), where the two patients may both have been on October 3. Photo by PetterLundkvist, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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