Delayed diagnosis and a dearth of essential medical resources continue to hinder Nigeria’s public health response more than the nature of the Ebola virus, a professor at the College of Medicine, University of Lagos, Dr. Alero Roberts, has said.
Roberts explained that the pathogen’s behaviour remains unchanged and predictable, adding that the real problem lies in systemic shortcomings and hesitation by members of the public, which she said compromises patient outcomes before medical intervention can begin.
“I have no problem with the virus itself; the virus is doing what the virus does, it hasn’t changed its behaviour, and the virus is doing what the virus does,.” she said during an interview on Channel Television’s The Morning Brief on Wednesday, while reacting to Nigeria’s first confirmed case of the Bundibugyo strain of he virus. “We do have problems with the delayed diagnosis, seeking appropriate care and definitely with the availability of resources to cope.”
The doctor also noted that no country in the world has the resources to manage the massive outbreak of the virus.
“No country in the world today has the resources to cope with the massive outbreak of Ebola. Once the diagnosis has been made, Ebola becomes a nursing care issue, and there are just not enough nurses; kudos to the nurses, there are just not enough nurses to cope with the major outbreak of Ebola,” Roberts said.
“Which is what we are seeing in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) already, so we must stick with prevention, border control, identifying, and as a public health physician I will be going with high index of suspicion to treat every patient as a possible case and initiate what we call the IPC ring.
“The IPC ring is Infection Prevention and Control; we have got to initiate that because those are our first line of defense and they have proven very effective in the past,” she added.
Speaking further on the breakfast show, Roberts said, “If you have been exposed but you do not have any symptoms, the good thing about Ebola is that you are not contagious. Ebola is a direct transmission disease, unlike COVID, which was airborne, so you need to have contact with the bodily fluid of a patient who is exhibiting symptoms already”.
She, however, noted that the 44 contacts with the patients are concerning but not an immediate danger.
“So the fact that there are 44 contacts, although that is very concerning, it doesn’t pose an immediate danger to the public if none of those contacts have developed symptoms,” she added.
The Federal Government on Tuesday said the virus was detected in a woman in FCT, Abuja, describing her as one who returned to Nigeria from Uganda with symptoms of the virus on October 7, the first in 12 years after the massive outbreak of the virus in Nigeria in 2014.
The patient was said to have been in contact with 44 people, and all of them were said to be under close monitoring for signs of symptoms.
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