Nigeria’s health authorities said on Friday that 62 Nigeria Ebola contacts completed 21-day monitoring without any of them developing the disease, according to Al Jazeera. The contacts were identified after the country’s first Ebola case in over a decade. The NCDC said the outbreak is not yet declared over.
The NCDC said none of the 62 contacts developed the disease, and the last contact had just been discharged, according to Al Jazeera. Thirteen contacts reported fever or other non-specific symptoms during monitoring. All of them tested negative for the virus, the agency said.
Nigeria confirmed its first case on October 20 in a Swiss woman who had travelled to Uganda and returned to Nigeria, according to Al Jazeera. NCDC Director General Dr. Jide Idris said at a press briefing in Abuja that the woman recovered and was discharged from hospital in Switzerland after testing negative, according to allAfrica.
The NCDC also said seven Ebola alerts across five Nigerian states over the past three weeks were investigated, and all seven tested negative, according to Al Jazeera.
The agency said that completing contact monitoring does not by itself mean the outbreak is over. Under WHO protocol, a full 42-day countdown is required from the recovery or departure of the last confirmed patient, according to Al Jazeera. Nigeria must complete that countdown before an official end-of-outbreak declaration can be made.
The case was linked to a wider Ebola outbreak first identified in Ituri, eastern DRC, in May. Cases have been reported in eight DRC provinces, Uganda, France, Kenya and Nigeria. In DRC, the outbreak is the second-largest on record, with more than 11,000 infected and more than 5,000 killed, according to government data. Al Jazeera reports that the strain is Bundibugyo, and there are no approved treatments or vaccines for it.
The sources do not say when Nigeria’s 42-day countdown began or when it would end. No response from WHO on Nigeria’s monitoring completion was included. The key facts rest mainly on Al Jazeera, with the briefing details from allAfrica. An Africanews report was available only as a headline and short excerpt, so it could not be independently verified.
Sources
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