With quick and decisive measures by some of its top doctors, Nigeria seems to have contained it first Ebola outbreak, the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported on Tuesday.
Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa with 177 million people. It is therefore not a mean feat given that the spread of Ebola still rages out of control in three other nations just a few hundred miles away and with lower population.
Nigeria becomes the first country to stop the spread of this disease which has the potential to harm many citizens in a country with vast, teeming slams.
“For those who say it’s hopeless, this is an antidote; you can control Ebola,” said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the director of the C.D.C.
Lagos, the capital city of Nigeria has a population of 21 million people and is the major transport and business hub. It is here that the first case of Ebola was reported on July 20.
Officials applaud the Nigerian government and the medical personnel for this success but they say the lessons here can not be applied to other countries at the epicenter like Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia.
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This they say is because in these other countries, the disease spread for a very long time in remote rain-forest provinces before any serious measures were put into place to contain it, while the Nigerian outbreak grew from a single airport case.
“Ebola won’t blow over; you have to make a rapid, intense effort,” Dr. Frieden said.
To date, the public officials in these other countries are still overwhelmed by the scale of the outbreak and are desperate for additional international assistance.
Still there is a lot to be done in Nigeria. Dr. Onyebuchi Chukwu, the Nigeria health minister said the danger in the country is not over yet.
He said in a telephone interview that his country is now more prepared than before. “We have six laboratories with response teams ready to perform diagnoses, and also have isolation wards ready in every state.”
Some of the measures undertaken by the health officials included making face-to-face visits to repeatedly take the temperatures of people who had contact with the Ebola victims. A total of 18,500 visits were made with nearly 900 people being attended to.
The success in Nigeria can also be attributed in part to a command center that was turned into an Ebola Emergency Operations Center. This command center was financed by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2012 and was meant to fight polio.
The United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also had 10 experts in Nigeria who were working on H.I.V. and polio. They had already trained 100 local doctors in epidemiology; 40 of them were immediately deployed to monitor the Ebola epidemic.
Dr. Faisal Shuaib, the chief of the command center, appreciated the work of the WHO, C.D.C., UNICEF, the International Committee for the Red Cross, and the Doctors Without Limits.
All these organizations came together to ensure that the outbreak in Nigeria was nipped in the bud.
Reference
http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/world/2014/09/30/ebola-labs-health-equipment-arrive-liberia/vYM88FDqo3FDRcBaBMd76K/story.html
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