EbolaNigerian authorities scramble to contain Ebola spread
Nigerian government has mobilized health workers to help spread information on Ebola and last week, Lagos health officials opened an emergency operation center in the city. Ebola has so far claimed two lives in Nigeria, and infected about a dozen. Both the dead and the infected came into contact with Patrick Sawyer, an American citizen working for the Liberian government who died of the disease a week-and-a-half ago in Lagos.
Nigerian health officials have confirmed ten Ebola cases and two deaths linked to Patrick Sawyer, a naturalized American citizen who had flown to Liberia, contracted Ebola, then flew to Nigeria, where he died at the First Consultant Medical Center in Lagos. Almost all of the suspected Ebola cases involve individuals who were in contact with Sawyer, and the second death was that of a nurse who had been caring for Sawyer.
The New York Times reports that the Nigerian government has mobilized health workers to help spread information on Ebola and last week, Lagos health officials opened an emergency operation center in the city. About seventy people are thought to have had contact with Sawyer. “The Nigerians understand the magnitude of the problem here,” said Dr. Frank Mahoney, an epidemiologist who has been leading the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Ebola response in Lagos. Thousands of people travel in and out of Nigeria daily, prompting fears that infected travelers may enter into Europe or the United States, putting those populations at serious risk. “We are very worried about this,” Mahoney said, pointing out that Nigeria’s health care system could easily become overwhelmed. “Lagos is such a huge city with such a mobile population,” he said.
Since health care workers face the greatest risk of infection, many doctors cheered a recent doctors’ strike in Nigeria which kept many medical workers out of hospitals. “It would have been a disaster,” said Babajide Saheed, a doctor and the secretary of the Lagos State chapter of the Nigerian Medical Association. “At the time, nobody was prepared for it.”
“Rapid epidemic transmission has been with us a long time, but my guess is that it’s accelerating, with the number of people on the move and intensity of air travel, global trade and the numbers of displaced people we have globally,” said economist Jeffrey D. Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. Sachs warns that climate change, population growth, and an increase in displaced populations means people are living more in previously uninhabited places, which in West Africa, can bring humans in closer contact with animal populations, leading to the rapid spread of rare diseases.
