New Threat: Ebola Spreads Further in Nigeria
By Maggie Fox
NBCNews.com
Sept. 3, 2014
Three people are sick with Ebola virus in Nigeria’s oil hub, Port Harcourt, World Health Organization officials said Wednesday — a worrying sign of spread linked to a single traveler who tried to elude treatment.
Now the Nigerian outbreak may spread even faster than feared, WHO says. WHO’s already raised the Ebola death toll to 1,900 people and predicts the epidemic will get worse before it gets better. WHO director-general Dr. Margaret Chan says it will likely last nine months or longer.
Earlier Wednesday, the medical missionary group SIM USA confirmed that 51-year-old family physician Dr. Rick Sacra was the third American to become infected with Ebola in Liberia.
All the Nigerian cases can be traced back to Patrick Sawyer, a Liberian-American consultant who fled to Nigeria after he became sick, infecting several health care workers who treated him in the capital of Lagos before he died in July.
“One close contact of the Lagos case fled the city, where he was under quarantine, to seek treatment in Port Harcourt,” WHO reports in an update. That patient infected a doctor who treated him in Port Harcourt.
The doctor, who died last month, infected his wife and a patient at the same hospital where he was treated. And he may have infected others.
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