A man who contracted Ebola in Nigeria after coming into contact with a
traveller from Liberia evaded surveillance and infected a doctor in
southern Nigeria who later died, Nigerian health authorities announced
on Thursday.
The death was the first in Nigeria outside Lagos, the
commercial capital. The incident raises the number of confirmed cases
in the country to 15, including six deaths.
Health minister
Onyebuchi Chukwu told reporters the man who evaded surveillance has
recovered and is now being watched in Lagos. The wife of the doctor who
treated him in Port Harcourt is also now being quarantined after she
developed symptoms of the deadly disease.
The man is a worker at
the Economic Community of West African States, who was a primary contact
of Liberian-American Patrick Sawyer, who flew into Lagos last month and
died of Ebola. He recovered after the late doctor treated him for
symptoms.
The doctor died on Friday in Port Harcourt and hasn't
been buried yet, the minister said, adding that morticians who embalmed
him are part of 70 people now under surveillance in Port Harcourt, the
capital of Rivers state and a hub for Nigeria's oil industry. The
country is Africa's largest oil producer.
Nigeria doesn't share
land borders with the three other Ebola-affected countries, Liberia,
Sierra Leone and Guinea and the first case arrived into Lagos by air.
The
disease has killed more than 1 400 people in Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria
and Sierra Leone, and Doctors Without Borders warned that the tremendous
influx of patients in Liberia, in particular, is overwhelming their
treatment centres there.
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