A team of leading Ebola scientists will travel to Nigeria to help investigate how the country’s first patient in more than a decade got infected, Africa Centres for Disease Control Director-General, Jean Kaseya told Reuters News Agency on Monday.
Their task will involve trying to work out how the female patient, the Ugandan-born wife of a Swiss diplomat based in Abuja, caught the Bundibugyo species of Ebola.
Her travel documents show she had not visited the outbreak epicentre in Democratic Republic of Congo, Kaseya said in an interview with Reuters in London.
“We have so many unknowns,” said Kaseya. “I’m bringing a group of scientists in Abuja because… we need to be led by science.”
One of the theories the scientists will investigate is a potential link between the patient in Nigeria and the first case in Kenya, reported earlier this month in a man who had travelled from Congo.
On Friday, genomic sequencing showed that the viruses that infected the two patients were closely related.
Meanwhile, Nigeria’s Ebola patient left the country on a medical evacuation flight to Switzerland on Monday morning, the health minister said, adding that her clinical condition was much improved.
The patient, the Ugandan-born wife of a Swiss diplomat based in Abuja, is Nigeria’s first Ebola case in more than a decade.
The possibility that the Nigerian patient became infected in Uganda, where officials say she spent a two-week holiday before returning to Abuja, has fuelled concerns about undetected transmission in a country where the outbreak had appeared to be under control.
Health Minister Muhammad Ali Pate said in a post on X that the woman was “stable, conscious, communicating, and her clinical laboratory test results closing towards baseline” before her evacuation flight departed.
