The Federal Government on Wednesday said Nigeria’s only Ebola case is being contained, urging Nigerians not to “fall into a trap of hysteria or panic”.
The Coordinating Minister of Health and Social Welfare, Prof Muhammad Pate, spoke to State House correspondents on Wednesday evening after a meeting with the Chief of Staff to the President, Femi Gbajabiamila, at the Presidential Villa, Abuja, on the Ebola situation.
Pate said the government was working with Uganda, and was tracing the case’s contacts to stop the virus from spreading.
“All I can tell you is that we are collaborating with our sister African nation of Uganda.
“What is important is that we have found this one case.
“We are doing contact tracing, and we are putting containment measures to ensure that it doesn’t go into our population,” he said.
The minister said Nigeria had handled the disease before and had the institutions to do so again.
“The Federal Government has competent authorities to deal with this. We have done it in 2014, and we have good public health institutions. Nigerians should be reassured.
“We must be vigilant, but not panic. People should respect public health information from trusted sources and not spread misinformation and false rumours,” Pate added .
The minister promised regular updates and said he would soon receive a report on the case.
“We will be truthful to Nigerians with the information that we receive on a daily basis.
If the situation changes, we will come out and inform Nigerians,” he affirmed.
The minister said the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control and Prevention had an incident management system and was “working 24/7”, while the Presidential Task Force on Ebola was also active.
He noted that the outbreak had run for five months without a case in Nigeria and that other countries had dealt with it.
He said, “It’s one case. It’s an imported case, and we are containing it.”
Asked about the review of the response plans, Pate said that was already under way, and that coordination with the office of the National Security Adviser and the task force had “served us well”.
“That has been ongoing. The truth of matter is that we have a very good response coordination mechanism with the office of the NSA with the public health measures with the task force, and that has served us well.
“In fact, we’re a large country, and I just travel a lot. And we have one case, and even that one case coming from outside our country, and we’ve been able to detect it and report it and be able to take effort to contain it,” said the Minister.
He said the government would meet again on Thursday.
Pate criticised what he called “a lot of noise” around the case, and said he had spoken that day to the person who discovered the virus 50 years ago.
He said past outbreaks had been contained in Uganda, Kenya and France, and that Nigerians panicked at news of the virus because they did not look beyond the country.
Pate argued that the response needed discipline and execution, but added that it also depended on the public.
“We’ve got the resources, we’ve got the backing of our president, we’ve got the mechanisms of cross institutions,” according to him.
He said the government could not control those who were told to isolate but instead went out to the market.
“That is not in the government’s hands,” he said.
Our correspondent spotted the Comptroller-General of the Nigeria Immigration Service, Kemi Nandap, and the Managing Director of the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria, Olubunmi Kuku, leaving the meeting.
Pate announced on Tuesday that a laboratory had confirmed Ebola in a woman who recently returned from Uganda, Voice of Nigeria reported.
Her symptoms began on October 7 and she sought care at a private hospital on October 11.
He said she was stable and in isolation, and that 44 contacts were being monitored.
The World Health Organisation had revealed that the virus was the Bundibugyo strain.
The WHO declared the outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda a public health emergency of international concern on May 16.
As of October 11, the DRC had 9,066 confirmed cases and 4,381 deaths, according to the WHO figures cited by Newsweek.
The WHO says there is no approved vaccine or specific treatment for Bundibugyo virus disease. Kenya confirmed an imported case this month, Al Jazeera reported.
On June 9, President Bola Tinubu set up a task force chaired by Gbajabiamila and approved N10bn for emergency preparedness.
Part of its measures include tougher screening at airports, QR-code health declarations for passengers from high-risk countries and isolation centres at the Lagos and Abuja airports.
At its inauguration on June 18, Gbajabiamila said there were no cases in the country and that Nigeria did not want “a repeat of what happened during the last outbreak when a carrier entered the country”.