The news from the health sector nationwide is refreshingly stirring. The minister of health, Professor Onyebuchi Chukwu, summarised the stirring news by the middle of last week with a terse matter-of-fact statement that the country was free of Ebola (no new infection, no one sick with it) since the week before. The news is stirring because it has reversed the gloom and anxiety and panic and lifted the pall of death that hung over the nation like the Sword of Damocles right from that fateful day, 20 July 2014, when a Liberian-American, Patrick Sawyer, touched down in Lagos, unsuspected by all that he was dying of the killer virus, Ebola. Announcement three days later that a Liberian suspected to be stricken by the virus was among us raised just a little concern. The little concern turned into fear when the man died five days after he arrived. From that moment on life in Lagos, and subsequently other parts of the country, went into a tailspin. Subsequent announcements that the medical facility in Lagos where Sawyer died had been shut down and all the medical workers who had contact with him placed under observation in a bid to squelch the spread of the virus did not quite hit home still. Until Sawyer came upon us like a whirlwind, most Nigerians had heard of the havoc of Ebola in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, all of them Nigeria’s neighbours along the West Coast of Africa, as they would of news out of Afganistan, too far away to be of particular concern. That was to change when in a matter of days some of the medical workers under observation were sickened by the virus. Deaths soon followed. Panic set in. When the virus claimed the life of Dr Ameyo Adadevoh, senior consultant who managed Sawyer on admission, what happened shocked the nation to its roots and brought home to all the possibility that we faced a potential calamity, because whoever had contact with Sawyer or with those who had contact with Sawyer and so and so forth down the line to the remotest tertiary contacts were at risk of contracting the virus and dying of it for lack of a cure or vaccine to prevent infection. Nigeria looked quartered. The federal government turned to America and the rest of the West for help, but none was offered. In fact, in what looked like a death wish to most Nigerians, the American government refused to sell to Nigeria, under a plethora of excuses, an experimental drug which the same American government had allowed to be used to treat its citizens stricken with the virus in the course of their work as medical missionaries in Liberia. But the Nigerian genius, forever denied by our domestic and foreign traducers, had shone forth right from the very moment the adversity struck and would blossom in the course of the struggle to contain and squash the viral mass killer. This newspaper, very early on, acknowledged the uniquely avuncular Nigerian approach or the Nigerianness in the immediate response to the Ebola threat. In an editorial on 4 August 2014, we wrote that the Ebola threat was “met with a prudent response... by all concerned.” The campaign to contain and defeat Ebola represents our best effort yet at tackling public emergency of any description. The federal ministry of health and the public health officials in Lagos State put politics under and came together in a historic unity of purpose to face a common enemy. Perhaps for the first time, Nigerian public officials did what we see only in foreign jurisdictions, briefing members of the public as a matter of routine on the crisis. There was also unceasing flow of public information on how to stay free from the disease. The public response was a study in diligence, responsiveness and due care. Most Nigerians walked around with hand sanitisers and duly sanitised or washed their hands very regularly during the day. Public and private offices as well as places of worship stocked up on and deployed hand sanitisers and infrared temperature “guns” to ensure that visitors were duly screened before entry were allowed into offices. The Ebola threat changed the way Nigerians interacted one with another. It outlawed handshake, hugging, kissing and such other acts of social intimacy and grace. Nigerians gave up much more to contain and stop the virus. The medical community came up with all the aces. Their heroine, in fact, the nation’s heroine in the conquest of Ebola, Dr Ameyo Adadevoh, gave her life for the health of her compatriots. I know she is in Heaven now. She headed up the team at First Consultant Hospital that stopped Sawyer from causing worse harm. She deserves whatever the nation would do in her memory. Ditto all the other health workers who were sickened by or died of the disease. What the Nigerian medical community and members of the public achieved with Ebola is a reaffirmation of the truth that Nigerians are uniquely talented and exceptionally hardworking. In the annals of pathology, no outbreak of such lethal virus as Ebola in an urban centre like Lagos where tens of millions live has been contained before the loss of hundreds if not thousands of lives.
Posted on: Sat, 27 Sep 2014 04:46:13 +0000