Thursday, October 23, 2014

Nigeria Declared Ebola-Free by WHO

The World Health Organization declared Nigeria free of Ebola on Monday, a sign of how swiftly the virus can be reined in using basic disease-containment measures.
There haven’t been any cases of Ebola in Africa’s largest country by population in 42 days, said the WHO’s country representative, Rui Gama Vaz, in a news conference in the capital Abuja.
“The last chain of transmission has been broken. The disease is gone,” said Dr. Vaz. “This is a spectacular story, that Ebola can be defeated.”
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All told, Nigeria kept its outbreak to 19 cases, of whom seven people died and 12 survived—a mortality rate of 37%.
Although health experts warn Ebola could return to Africa’s top economy, Nigeria’s victory over the virus demonstrated that quickly isolating people with potential symptoms and tracking all of their contacts—894 in Nigeria—through a 21-day maximum incubation period can keep it in check.
Those methods also worked in Senegal, whose impoverished government—which depends on a rain-fed peanut harvest for revenue—limited its own outbreak to a single individual. On Friday, the WHO declared Senegal Ebola-free, too.
Public-health officials have Nigeria, Senegal and countries with past Ebola outbreaks like Uganda in mind when they say they know how to stop the disease. Uganda was unprepared when Ebola struck in 2000, causing the largest outbreak until the West African epidemic.
But over the past several years, the country’s health authorities, working with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other international advisers, have learned to monitor actively for signs of Ebola and other infectious pathogens in humans, as well as animals.
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They respond quickly to cases; three Ebola outbreaks since 2000 were stamped out quickly. The country recently reported one case of Marburg, a virus related to Ebola and similarly deadly, and has identified nearly 200 possible contacts of the victim, a health-care worker who died. No additional cases have been identified, said a Ugandan health official.
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