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Health

Nigeria's Ebola patient evacuated to Switzerland; WHO says Nigeria now has no cases

Nigeria's only confirmed Ebola patient was evacuated by air to Switzerland on Monday, and the World Health Organization's Africa chief said Nigeria currently has no Ebola cases.

By James Calloway · · 2 min read

Nigeria’s only confirmed Ebola patient was evacuated by air to Switzerland on Monday, Reuters reported, and the World Health Organization’s regional director for Africa said Nigeria currently has no Ebola cases.

The patient, the Ugandan-born wife of a Swiss diplomat based in Abuja, is Nigeria’s first Ebola case in more than a decade, Reuters reported. She left the country on a medical evacuation flight on Monday morning, Nigerian Health Minister Muhammad Ali Pate said.

Pate said the woman was clinically much improved, “stable, conscious, communicating, and her clinical laboratory test results closing towards baseline”. He added: “This does not mean she is not still infectious,” according to Agence France-Presse.

Her husband, who has remained asymptomatic, was evacuated with her, Reuters reported. WHO regional director Mohamed Janabi said Nigeria would continue monitoring 52 contacts, while Switzerland would manage the patient and follow up with her husband as contact number 53.

Janabi said the patient was clinically stable after Nigerian medical teams managed her through the acute phase of the illness.

Nigerian authorities said last week that her condition had at one point deteriorated into multi-organ failure, AFP reported. She had travelled from Uganda to Abuja on 3 October, according to the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, and caught the Bundibugyo species of Ebola.

This is a follow-up to Flip News’s report on Monday on scientists probing the origin of the Nigeria case, after genomic sequencing linked her virus closely to Kenya’s first case.

Sources

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