Africa CDC calls an extraordinary meeting
Africa's Center for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) said late Wednesday that it would convene an "extraordinary virtual meeting" of national health officials. The aim is to coordinate the response as the continent's latest Ebola outbreak keeps spreading, DW reported.
Africa CDC Director General Dr. Jean Kaseya described the October 28 session as an opportunity to "strengthen our collective response." In a post on X, he wrote that "Ebola is now affecting three regions of Africa" and that the situation "demands urgent action and political leadership at the highest level."
Kaseya also said Africa has the expertise, institutions and capacity to defeat the outbreak. "We must act together and we must act now," he wrote.
Nigeria confirms a case
The meeting announcement followed news on Tuesday that the virus had reached Nigeria. According to DW, it arrived with a woman who had returned from Uganda earlier in the month.
Nigerian authorities say they are tracing 44 contact persons. Health Minister Muhammad Pate said officials are "doing everything possible to contain this case."
Olajumoke Babatunde, director of the public health laboratory service at the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, said the patient's samples went through three levels of testing, all of them molecular. "The strain was Bundibugyo," she said.
Africa CDC's Wissam Mankoula said it is still not confirmed that the patient had traveled to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). He said Nigeria and Uganda are sharing information to research the possible source of exposure.
A disputed link to Uganda
Uganda recorded 20 cases in this outbreak and declared itself "Ebola-free" in July. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the Uganda outbreak over on August 27. DW reports that Uganda has rejected Nigeria's claims about the case.
Headlines from other outlets cited in the source material point to the same uncertainty. Reuters reported that the WHO and Africa CDC say the Nigerian patient is not confirmed to have visited Congo. The Associated Press reported that the first Ebola patients in Nigeria and Kenya might have crossed paths at an airport in Uganda. The source material does not give further detail on that report.
An outbreak of unusual scale and reach
More than 9,500 people have been infected since the virus was first confirmed in the DRC in May, and nearly half of them have died, DW reported. The WHO says it is the fastest-growing Ebola outbreak ever.
The outbreak involves the rare Bundibugyo virus, for which no approved vaccines or treatments exist. It has spread to four countries in Africa and is active in two of them. It has also reached central, eastern and western regions of the continent, a wider spread than in previous outbreaks.
One French national, a doctor doing humanitarian work in transmission zones inside the DRC, was infected. The doctor recovered after treatment at a specialized facility in France.
For its part, the WHO advised "all countries in the region to sustain a high level of readiness as the DRC outbreak continues to evolve."
