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| Nigeria health officials wait to screen passengers at the arrival hall of Murtala Muhammed International Airport in Lagos, Nigeria, Monday, Aug. 4, 2014. Nigerian authorities on Monday confirmed a second case of Ebola in Africa's most populous country, an alarming setback as officials across the region battle to stop the spread of a disease that has killed more than 700 people. |
ABUJA, Nigeria
(AP) -- The doctor who treated a man who flew to Nigeria and died of
Ebola now has contracted the disease, authorities said Monday,
presenting a dire challenge to Africa's most populous nation as the
regional toll for the outbreak grew to 887 dead.
As
Nigerian health authorities rushed to quarantine others who had been
exposed to the doctor, a special plane landed in Liberia to evacuate the
second American missionary who fell ill with Ebola. Nancy Writebol, 59,
is expected to arrive in Atlanta on Tuesday, where she will be treated
at a special isolation ward.
The second
confirmed case in Nigeria is a doctor who treated Patrick Sawyer, the
Liberian-American man who died July 25 days after arriving in Nigeria
from Liberia, said Nigerian Health Minister Onyebuchi Chukwu.
Three
others who also treated Sawyer now show symptoms of Ebola and their
test results are pending, he said. Authorities are trying to trace and
quarantine others in Lagos, sub-Saharan Africa's largest city of 21
million people.
"This cluster of cases in
Lagos, Nigeria is very concerning," said Dr. Tom Frieden, director of
the U.S. Centers for Disease Controls and Prevention, which is
dispatching 50 experienced disease control specialists to West Africa.
"It
shows what happens if meticulous infection control, contact tracing,
and proper isolation of patients with suspected Ebola is not done.
Stopping the spread in Lagos will be difficult but it can be done," he
said.
The World Health Organization announced
Monday that the death toll has increased from 729 to 887 deaths in
Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Nigeria.
Cases
in Liberia jumped from 156 to 255, WHO said, as the government ordered
that all Ebola victims must now be cremated because of rising opposition
to burials in neighborhoods around the capital. Over the weekend,
police were called in amid a standoff over whether health authorities
could bury nearly two dozen victims in a neighborhood on the outskirts
of the capital, Monrovia.
Sierra Leone marked a
national stay-at-home day Monday in an effort to halt the disease's
spread. A documentary film of the first outbreak of the Ebola disease in
Congo was being shown intermittently throughout the day by the national
broadcaster.
The emergence of a second case
in Nigeria raises serious concerns about the infection control practices
there, and also raises the specter that more cases could emerge. It can
take up to 21 days after exposure to the virus for symptoms to appear.
They include fever, sore throat, muscle pains and headaches. Often
nausea, vomiting and diarrhea follow, along with severe internal and
external bleeding in advanced stages of the disease.
"This
fits exactly with the pattern that we've seen in the past. Either
someone gets sick and infects their relatives, or goes to a hospital and
health workers get sick," said Gregory Hartl, World Health Organization
spokesman in Geneva. "It's extremely unfortunate but it's not
unexpected. This was a sick man getting off a plane and unfortunately no
one knew he had Ebola."
Doctors and other
health workers on the front lines of the Ebola crisis have been among
the most vulnerable to infection as they are in direct physical contact
with patients. The disease is not airborne, and only transmitted through
contact with bodily fluids such as saliva, blood, vomit, sweat or
feces.
Sawyer, who was traveling to Nigeria on
business, became ill while aboard a flight and Nigerian authorities
immediately took him into isolation upon arrival in Lagos. They did not
quarantine his fellow passengers, and have insisted that the risk of
additional cases was minimal.
Nigerian
authorities said a total of 70 people are under surveillance and that
they hoped to have eight people in quarantine by the end of Monday in an
isolation ward in Lagos.
Tracking down all
the people who came into contact with Sawyer and his caregivers could
prove difficult at this late stage, said Ben Neuman, a virologist and
Ebola expert at Britain's University of Reading.
"Contact
tracing is essential but it's very hard to get enough people to do
that," he said. "For the average case, you want to look back and catch
the 20 to 30 people they had closest contact with and that takes a lot
of effort and legwork ... The most important thing now is to do the
contact tracing and quarantine any contacts who may be symptomatic."
