Nigeria has one confirmed case of Ebola, a 42-year-old woman living in Abuja who tested positive on Tuesday, and health authorities have identified 44 people who came into contact with her. The question of where she was infected has turned into a public disagreement between two governments and the continent’s own health agency.
Jean Kaseya, director-general of Africa CDC, said the agency needs the patient to set out her full travel history and her contacts, including whether she left Kampala and whether she met anyone from the Democratic Republic of Congo. He put it bluntly. “What we want is collaboration from this person, the lady. She has to disclose to the authorities,” he said.
Nigeria’s account is that she spent about two and a half weeks in Kampala and returned home on Oct. 3 by way of Addis Ababa. Symptoms began on Oct. 6, according to Kaseya, and she was admitted to hospital on Oct. 11. Muhammad Pate, Nigeria’s coordinating minister of health and social welfare, said she is stable and responding to treatment, and that Nigeria is working with Uganda, Ethiopia and Africa CDC to establish where the infection happened. “We cast the net wide so that we contain it as broadly as possible,” he told the BBC.
Uganda’s health ministry describes her differently: a Nigerian national who travelled to eastern DRC on business and only transited through Uganda. It says it has no active confirmed cases and that transiting the country does not establish she was infected there. Kaseya has said she was born in Uganda, which does not match Uganda’s description of her. None of these accounts has been independently confirmed, and no authority has stated which strain of the virus she carries.
The outbreak these questions lead back to is in DR Congo, where the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control recorded 9,552 confirmed cases and 4,602 related deaths as of Oct. 19, across eight provinces. Uganda had its own cases in May and June of this year, caused by the Bundibugyo strain.
Why this matters beyond the three capitals involved: a single case in Abuja, a city of several million with an international airport, is the point at which contact tracing either works or does not. The 44 contacts are the figure to watch. The patient is also, it is worth stating plainly, a patient, not a suspect, and the pressure on her to account for herself in public is a choice the agencies have made.
Africa CDC has asked for the information to avoid what Kaseya called disputes between countries. The dispute is already under way.
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