UN says $ 600 million needed to tackle Ebola virus spread
USWARNS OUTBREAK IS OUT OF CONTROL AS CLOSE TO 400 PEOPLE DIED IN THE PAST WEEK
The Ebola outbreak in Nigeria’s oil producing hub of Port Harcourt could spread wider and faster than in the financial capital, Lagos, the World Health Organisation warned yesterday.
The UN health body said the virus’ arrival in Port Harcourt, 435 kilometres east of Lagos and home to oil and gas majors such as Shell, Total and Chevron, showed “multiple highrisk opportunities for transmission of the virus to others”.
Until the Port Harcourt case was announced, Nigeria’s government had indicated that the virus was contained in Lagos.
Nigerian authorities aremonitoring nearly 400 people for signs of Ebola after they came in contact with a Port Harcourt doctor who died of the disease but hid the fact that he had been exposed, a senior Nigerian health official said yesterday.
Dr. Abdulsalami Nasidi, project director at Nigeria Centre for Disease Control, said there was a sense of “hopelessness” due to the lack of proven drugs or vaccines to treat Ebola that has infected 18 people in Africa’s most populous nation.
He said that more isolation wards were being opened in the oil industry hub but voiced confidence that therewouldnot be “many cases” there.
Doctor infected
After having contact with an Ebola patient and before his own death on August 22, the Port Harcourt doctor, named by local authorities as Iyke Enemuo, carried on treating patients and met scores of friends, relatives and medics, leaving about 60 of them at high risk of infection, the World Health Organisation said onWednesday.
The doctor’swife, who is also a physician, and a patient in the same hospital have been infected with Ebola, theWHO said.
“Everything about this doctor was in secrecy, he violated our public health laws by treating a patient with a highly pathogenic agent who revealed to him that he had contact with Ebola and didn’t want to be treated in Lagos because he might be put in isolation,” Nasidi said.
“He treated him in secrecy outside hospital premises. When he became ill he did not reveal to his colleagues that he