Following the announcement on Tuesday, 26 August, 2014 that only one patient is remaining with the Ebola virus in Nigeria, the Federal Government has warned against complacency in the fight against the dreaded disease. Nigeria’s Health Minister, Onyebuchi Chukwu, had announced on Tuesday that two more people had been released from isolation, taking the total number of patients to have been successfully treated to seven. No fewer that five people have died in Nigeria since 20 July, 2014, when a Liberian businessman, Patrick Sawyer imported the Ebola virus into Nigeria. Sawyer later died from the disease on 25 July in a Lagos hospital. Speaking on the outbreak of the Ebola virus in Nigeria on Wednesday, 27 August, 2014, the health minister cautioned against congratulatory headlines that suggested the virus had been eradicated in Africa’s most populous nation. According to Chukwu, instead, the country was “doing well on containment”, likening the situation to trapping a wild animal in a cage. “Nigeria has been successful at containment. But have we eliminated the disease? No,” he told reporters in Abuja. It would be recalled that the World Health Organisation, WHO, recently released a report where it said it was encouraged by the fact that all confirmed cases of Ebola in Nigeria had come from a single chain of transmission and there had been no incidences of the virus outside Lagos. Chukwu, however, said that “nothing stops someone coming with a fresh case” and that the patient currently in hospital needed to be managed and any contacts they may have had kept under surveillance. The Minister of Health, Prof. Onyebuchi Chukwu, has said Nigeria has only one active case of the Ebola virus “Until we give a clean bill of health to every contact, we cannot say we have eliminated the disease,” he added, warning that it was “still possible” to have several more confirmed cases. “Even if… we have been able to discharge all contacts, as long there is one case of Ebola Virus Disease anywhere in the world and people are allowed to travel, every country in the world remains at risk. “We only stop being at risk when the very last case of Ebola Virus Disease under this current epidemic has gone,” Chukwu said. Nigeria’s Education Minister Ibrahim Shekarau announced on Tuesday that both public and private schools would remain closed until October 13 as a precaution against Ebola. Students had been due to resume classes on September 15. President Goodluck Jonathan had previously announced an extension to the summer break and Chukwu said he saw no contradiction in the measure as having large groups of children together could cause “problems”. Apart from Nigeria, other West African countries fighting against the Ebola virus are Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. Over 1350 people have died from Ebola virus while 2473 new cases of the disease have been confirmed in West Africa since February, 2014, this is according to the WHO.
Posted on: Wed, 27 Aug 2014 22:45:43 +0000
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