Nigeria has confirmed its first case in the current Ebola outbreak after a woman tested positive in the capital, Abuja, health minister Muhammad Pate said, making Africa's most populous country the latest to report an infection as the outbreak spreads across the region.
The woman began showing symptoms on 7 October and was admitted to a hospital in Abuja four days later, where she was diagnosed with Ebola. Nigerian authorities have not disclosed her nationality or said exactly when she arrived in the country. Uganda's health ministry said she is a Nigerian woman who had only transited through Uganda on a business trip to the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, and stressed that 'travel through Uganda does not establish that infection occurred here,' adding that the country has 'no confirmed active Ebola cases' of its own.
Tracing the contacts
'We are doing everything possible to contain this case by tracing all the contacts the individual may have had,' Pate said. Authorities have identified 44 people as contacts of the patient and begun monitoring them. The Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) said it had been stepping up surveillance for two weeks already, after Ebola was detected in Kenya, and had focused on 'early detection, isolation and referral, laboratory diagnosis, infection prevention and control, contact tracing, risk communication and protection of health care workers.' Nigeria set up a dedicated Ebola taskforce in June, shortly after the outbreak began in DR Congo in mid-May.
Kenya confirmed its own first case earlier this month and has since recorded nine infections, making Nigeria the fourth country drawn into an outbreak that began in the DRC.
'An extremely serious threat'
The strain involved, Bundibugyo ebolavirus, is rarer and historically somewhat less lethal than the more familiar Zaire strain, but the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention's director-general, Dr Jean Kaseya, said on social media that 'we are facing an extremely serious threat,' citing a fatality rate of nearly 50% among confirmed cases. He described the outbreak as already 'the most geographically extensive in history,' having reached countries spread across three regions of the continent.
This Bundibugyo Ebola outbreak has already become the most geographically extensive in history, affecting several countries spread across three regions of Africa.
Dr Jean Kaseya, Africa CDC director-general
According to the World Health Organization, the outbreak has now infected more than 9,500 people and killed more than 4,600 — figures that put it on track to exceed the roughly 11,000 deaths recorded in West Africa's 2014–2016 epidemic, which remains the deadliest Ebola outbreak ever recorded.
What happens next
Nigerian officials say the priority now is completing contact tracing before the window for early isolation closes, while Africa CDC and the WHO work to determine whether the virus is moving through established travel and trade routes or emerging through separate chains of transmission. With four countries now affected and no sign the outbreak has peaked, health authorities across the region say they expect more cases to surface in the coming weeks, even in places with strong surveillance systems like Nigeria's.
